If you're a real professional, you will see your work as a career. I despise the hucksters who talk about "building the personal brand," but an important part of building a career is keeping a professional record of what you do. Such a record describes skills, knowledge, and experience in such a way that other professionals can find within it the credentials of competency. This is the official resume. For professionals who work on projects, the resume should describe them in three parts: the client, the project, and your personal deliverables.
Here is an example.
So-and-so is a Canadian energy company focused on exploration and development of natural gas. They have had an enterprise license for over 4,000 seats of Livelink in two instances for years, but use it unevenly: for example, land records are managed well, but other areas are just dumping grounds. Interestingly, SharePoint is officially forbidden.
This project was designed to increase usage and improve access to specific document collections by building a friendly and interactive search screen. It was written using WebReports, not OScript, and subsumed standard Livelink functionality such as a custom category, LiveReports, and forms. The project lasted from March to August, 2010.
Mr. Such-and-Such was the BA and PM for this project. Working from incomplete requirements, he wrote the project charter, AFE, CIS model, UI, test scripts, user documentation, system documentation, and lessons learned. He maintained status reports and a change order. He wrote one WebReport, communicated detailed requirements to the remote development team for many others, and installed the application in multiple environments.
The trend in resumes for professionals is to focus on the value delivered ideally in monetary terms. You would also include your actions to make this happen.
ReplyDeleteThe items should be short and concise, with just enough detail to generate interest. Ideally a decision maker or a hiring manager will want to talk to you to find out more.
You should be prepared to expand on the item including being able to describe the situation. This is referred to as Situation Action Result.
An example:
Designed and implemented an automated deployment process and scripts that resulted in decreased errors and saved $10,000 in deployment costs per month.
For the situation you would describe the methodology before the changes.
Thanks Brian. I do have a beef when people are obviously stretching to find monetary or other numerical measures, but the example you gave is excellent. We use this format for our company and have gotten good feedback from hiring managers, other professionals, prospects, and partners.
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