Sheep Guarding Llama

In any career your resume is important. In IT it is more important than most because you will spend a greater portion of your career job hunting than in a more traditional field. This is not necessarily a bad thing and should not cause panic. IT often rewards broad experience garnered from different types and sizes of organizations, promotes quickly through job changes and utilizes a high percentages of contractors and consultants all leading to the need for constant resume submittal. Because of this the need for an always ready, polished, professional resume is important.

An important rule to remember about IT resumes is that they are not like resumes in other fields and you should not be taking resume writing advice from non-IT pros. Other fields have completely different resume requirements than IT. IT requires your resume to hold long lists of specific technologies that can be searched by keyword, IT professionals tend to work many short term jobs meaning that more jobs exist on your resume than on a traditional resume, IT professionals tend to have more certifications than any other career – possibly by orders of magnitude, IT professionals will often have as much high education as almost any other field, etc. Hiring manages worth their weight are not looking for short one page resumes with highlights of your career but are looking for useful details that will set you apart from other candidates. So begin by ignoring your high school guidance counselor’s requirement that your resume not go over one page. I have been told by many senior hiring managers that five to seven pages is perfect as long as it is filled with relevant information. Don’t fill with fluff, don’t add giant margins or use big fonts but don’t start cutting important information in an attempt to keep your resume short either.

One of the first things that most experienced IT pros seem to agree that needs to be changed is the traditional concept of the “Objective” in a resume. Just drop it. Forget about it. Objectives are for fast food workers who want to be considered someday for a shift manager position not for deskside support contractors. No one is hiring your for your “career goal” – they are looking to see if you can fill the role that they need now. That’s it. Period. Cut the objective and never think of it again. It looks amateur and isn’t going to help and it looks like you are trying to fill space. You can only get away with using one as long as your resume doesn’t spill to a second page.

Your resume should be ready at all times. Start working on it early even if it is mostly just a blank piece of paper. The first time that someone asks you for your resume you shouldn’t have to hesitate or run to whip something up. Have it ready. Have it updated. Have it available in Doc, ODF and PDF formats. Be prepared to print it out or email it at a moments notice. I suggest getting a web site to host it on as well so that if you are driving somewhere and someone wants you resume right that second you can just point them to your resume’s website and they can download it in whatever format they want. Be a boyscout – be prepared. By having your resume always ready ahead of time you will also have plenty of time to make sure that nothing is missing and that nothing is misspelled and that the formatting is flawless. You might even want to keep a paper copy or two around for emergencies. Maybe even a copy in your car.

What should you include on your sparse entry-level resume? Your name, a professional email address – I use one with the same domain as my online resume but you can get a good, professional one from Yahoo or GMail as well but custom just has that extra something to it, a breakdown of any previous work experience, certifications, educational experience – if you have no degree but some classes whether high school, college or other include them briefly, volunteer experience, your home network – keep it brief and buried but let people find it if they are interested, contact phone number – but probably not on the online available version, a list of technologies and tools with which you are familiar and locational information – the town(s) that you are based out of or available from without relocation and possibly relocation information.

The “Resume Method”, as I like to call it, is a method of encouraging ongoing learning while developing a complete and impressive resume. This is a method that I used myself and have promoted over the years. This is something that I picked up from my days as a role-play gamers in high school. Basically your resume represents where you are in your career. This is true with anyone’s resume not just in IT but in most careers the only thing that can go on your resume are jobs (and most people only change ever several years at most) and education (and most people get only one or two degrees at most) so their resumes are short, unchanging and mostly forgotten about between jobs requiring a complete rewrite with every potential job change. IT professionals’ resumes are ever changing and can be added to rapidly – especially during formative career years.

The key to the “Resume Method” is to use your resume as a guide to learning new technologies or skills and to getting certifications and other forms of recognition. In IT it is easy to look at a blank resume and decide to start filling it out. Anyone entering the field should have one or two basic technologies that they have a good understanding of such as Windows XP, OpenOffice, Word, Excel, etc. Start by putting these on your resume. Then you will notice that there is a gap in your certifications so it is probably time to get to work getting a CompTIA A+ or other such introductory certifications. This will take several weeks but while working on the A+ you will have opportunities to work with a few new technologies such as, perhaps, Windows 2000 Professional which you may then work with enough to feel confident adding to your resume. As a breather from your A+ studies maybe you want to work with Access or some other light technology that you can get comfortable with in a few days and add to your resume as well.

Filling resume gaps will be a key motivator for quite some time. Search for jobs online and discover resume line items that are highly sought after and that fall within an obtainable range for you and you can probably target them to get them to a point where you can add them in as well. Once you have two or three traditional certifications it can be well worth investing in a subscription to Brainbench and beginning to work on adding online certifications as well to back up your independent studies. Brainbench offers traditionally targeted IT certifications as well as highly specific technology certs that do not exist from other vendors and non-IT skill certs that can be used to demonstrate “soft” skills such as customer service or telephone etiquette which you will eventually want to drop from your resume but can demonstrate not just skills but a dedication to learning not just with the IT technical disciplines. Caring enough to spend time and money obtaining certifications in customer service can be a differentiator compared to job candidates hoping to progress through skills alone.

Every additional line that is added to your resume represents an opportunity for an employer to find you in a search or to pick you out from the crowd. You don’t always know what on your resume will catch the eye of a hiring manager but you don’t want to leave out a critical piece of information because you are attempting to keep your resume too short nor do you want to bury potentially beneficial information in a sea of spin and verbiage. Keep job descriptions short and to the point. Verbosity is not rewarded in resumes.

Work on your resume on a regular basis. Make it simple but attractive. Easy to follow and keep the reading down. Your resume will spend a lot more time being scanned than being read. You need to optimize it for this process.

Few fields of study expect the level of reading that Information Technology expects.  Reading is a part of everyday life in IT and the more you read the better position you will be in when interviewing.  The use of paper based books and magazines is obviously diminishing and online resources are beginning to take their place which is somewhat changing the way that we view information but by and large IT reading remains roughly the same regardless of its form.

Magazines remain a strong resource and are a great source for maintaining a solid baseline in the industry.  Trade publications are often available for free to career professionals once you are a year or two into the field but before then they are generally available online either in whole or in part.   There are many publications available and becoming buried under a mountain of print media can be detrimental as well so picking and choosing quality publications is important.

Almost every IT professional should real a few basics, I believe, including InfoWorld and eWeek.  These are very general publications dealing with a large cross section of the industry touching on software development, enterprise management, hardware, software, etc.  They include trends, hot topics, pundits, etc. and have a lot of value for enterprising young hopefuls as well as seasoned industry veterans.  I have read both of these weekly rags for many years and will continue to do so.  I also subscribe to many of their RSS feeds online for more immediate news.

As many, if not most, early career IT professionals or pre-career ITPs will spend a large portion of their early career working in the Windows desktop work I highly recommend Windows IT Pro and TechNet magazines which are very practical and technically oriented.  Magazines like this will show you real world skills that other Windows professionals are interested in learning and helps to keep you in touch with the industry in a more specific way.

Don’t get buried by magazines.  At some point you will start “magazine thrashing” and it will no longer be useful to you.  There are magazine targeted at almost any specific IT technology.  Finding magazine that are designed around what you need to know and are useful and factual will be very beneficial to you.

Books serve a different role.  Instead of keeping you up to date on the latest trends and news books will help you build a strong technological theory foundation.  Books come out more slowly than other forms of media and are generally designed to sit on shelves for a long time and remain mostly relevant.  This means that the focus of the books will be vastly different from most other things.  Rapidly the Internet seems to be taking over the “how-to” market that books used to fill.  This would include detailed guides to technologies.  For example when I first learned about Windows NT server I did so by buying several large books on the technology and read them.  To learn the same technology today I might buy a single book that covers the basics and the “Microsoft way” on certain things but would learn specific tasks by doing online research.  This has lowered the cost of getting into IT somewhat over the last few years.

More so an investment in books will be more valuable if the books are less technology oriented and more theoretical.  In this way books are more similar to collegiate work – laying a foundation but not providing particulars – whereas magazines and the Internet remain better for the day to day practical applications.  This is not always so clear cut and many IT professionals continue to use technology related books because a well researched book from a respected publisher and author can help to provide a good understanding of many aspects of a technology, provide background and history and more that is often lacking from a practical, hands-on Internet how-to or guide.  Using a balanced variety of resources is the best approach.

As an IT professional reading will always be a core activity whether it is books, periodicals or Internet based.  The field is demanding and a large amount of reading is important for maintaining as well as for growth.  Additionally I have found it to be important to always be in the process of reading a good book and always keep up with at least two magazines.  It is not uncommon in interviews to be asked what you are currently reading and you want to be prepared to talk about the current resources that you are using in your personal growth.

Academic experience is the most common way of entering most professions. In Information Technology it likely remains so although it is probably the lowest ratio of such of any technical profession. Collegiate level IT studies suffer from a number of factors that together create a unique situation for the IT industry. The key factors include high income rates for professionals, rapid pace of technological change, easy technology access to younger students and a poor understanding of the field outside of the industry which has resulted in high schools often guiding talented students away from the IT fields from an unfounded belief that there are few and decreasing job opportunities regardless of the continuing vacuum existing in the American IT workforce even after increased off-shoring and professional immigration.

Because of these issues colleges and universities have faced an unprecedented challenge in attempting to prepare the IT workforce. Information Technology, drastically more so than even Computer Science, has possibly the greatest disparity between what the collegiate system is turning out and what industry, and often students, are expecting. Students entering IT programs will often range from novices looking to get their first taste of IT in the hopes of making career decisions to students with more than a dozen years of amateur programming experience, several years of professional experience or work on open source projects, hands on experience with a range of technologies and an in-depth knowledge of many technologies exceeding many long-term industry professionals and professors. While any gifted student can exist in any program in any field it is nearly impossible to find an education student or a medical students or a law student that enter, at age eighteen, into college with years of experience behind them and with having had access almost equal to that of top professionals and researchers! Because of this disparity colleges and universities have a new challenge to deal with that they have never had to deal with previously.

All people learn differently and for some people collegiate work is the easiest or best way for them to obtain new knowledge. Information Technology is an industry based on change and one of the most critical skills that any IT professional will have is the ability to learn and knowledge as to how they learn best as an individual. Students who are self motivated and that can learn without external pressures or resources will have a significant advantage as individualized learning allows one to focus more, advance faster and learn more flexibly than students who, for their entire careers, will require classroom settings for educational enrichment. Most students will benefit most from a blend of educational opportunities.

While continuing academic is a traditional method of entering a profession student in IT related fields should consider this decision more strongly than in other professions because of the abundance of other resources. Academic work in the IT field is often best used as a supplement rather than a comprehensive educational solution. Students using only academic work for their studies will generally find that their knowledge is far too shallow for real world work – even entry level – and that key technology areas have been missed.

Students in academia generally also face the challenges of mounting debt from the college programs themselves. This should not be discounted as that debt could not only be disadvantageous in its own right but could also cause the student to later be unable to take key opportunities that come with higher inherent risk but offer greater career growth rather than sticking with slower growth, more stable positions. IT rewards flexibility more than most fields and students should be considering this early.

I have long suggested that students use collegiate work as a means to “fill in the gaps” between other things. College level work should never take precedence over real work experience. If college is considered to be more important than work than clearly there is a discrepancy between reality and the stated goal of an extended education. If the purpose of college is not to get work and not to advance in your career then by all means spend as much time in college as possible. But if college is not the goal but your career is the goal then college should be treated as a tool in a set of tools that can be used to forward your career.

I suggest that college work, whether done solely or if done while working in the field or while participating in other studies, be done in as “stepped” a manner as possible. By this I am specifically referring to the Associate Degree available in the United States. This is typically a two years degree. A good, accredited “junior college” will offer an array of two year degree choices that will transfer easily then to a four year school. Even if you intend to go directly on to a four year degree there are many benefits to a two year degree but the most important is that you will have obtained a full degree and could then leverage it to get a professional position or a promotion at a current position. And if anything goes wrong and you are unable to complete, in a timely fashion, a four year degree you will have the two year degree in place. Some four year universities like the State University of New York’s Empire State College offer mixed two and four year programs where you take a single program but receive an Associate Degree halfway to your Bachelor Degree.
I heartily recommend college educations because they, like all forms of education, will encourage broadening and may point you in directions that you would not have gone on your own. There are certainly people who will do better with no college level work at all but they are the minority but perhaps not as small a minority as you may think. Some people absolutely need college work and cannot function without it. But for the average hopeful IT professional my stock recommendation is to take classes when they don’t interfere with work or the potential for work (i.e. you don’t have to give up interviewing and contracting just because you have to go to class.)

College and university studies in IT are currently best utilized by professionals in the early portions of their career but after having entered the field. Often It professionals have an opportunity to take college classes part time fully and principally funded by their employers. This changes the picture dramatically as you will not take a break from experience while going to school, you will get the obvious advantage of the degree itself and you have an employer who is likely to appreciate that you were willing to take advantage of their continuing education program.

Because of college’s extremely high costs both financially and in its requirements on your valuable time it is a very high risk when compared to other methods of breaking into IT. While it has its place and should, in time, begin to become more useful as the pace of IT change begins to slow and schools begin to adapt to the rigors of IT college work is still currently not the panacea that it appears to be in other fields and should not be thought of as such. Potential students should consider their options carefully.

Once having entered the field and having begun to amass experience young IT professionals should begin to look at college as a supplement to their ongoing learning and work.  The earlier in your career that a degree is obtained the more time that it will work for you and the more meaningful the material will be.  But if it is done in lieu of actual work experience it is unlikely that even by the end of your career that a college degree will ever manage to pay for the time that it will cost you let alone the money that it will likely cost.

In conclusion, college and university studies are very likely to be highly valuable to you during your career especially in lean economic times and when you look to make a move into management.  But college is not necessarily a good tool for “getting your foot in the door” of your career but is better used as a growth tool after a year or two of consistent work.  Most people seriously interested and dedicated to moving into IT will probably find that three to six months of independent study and working on learning “at home” will be enough to land that first entry-level contract or job which is far sooner than college work will help with the same objective.