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Re: [PhillyOnRails] Resume advice
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I think you may be selling yourself short if you approach being a
developer as something you need formal training in in order to excel.
If you've been working in Rails and Django and Plone, my goodness, you
have the street cred to go anywhere and do anything. My own "real"
training is as a photographer, and that hasn't kept me out of too many
jobs along the way.
What you probably haven't been doing is getting paid a lot to do it
(cough, non-profit, cough), which may be where your insecurity is
coming from here.
I would recommend a simple chronological resume of your education and
work experience, probably nothing all that different from what you
already have.
Then make a second document which breaks out the projects you have
worked on, listing their business objectives, the systems you built to
achieve those objectives, and the tools you used along the way. Don't
forget the results! Think of these as Keynote slides, simple
bullet-points etc. to outline each case study and leave them hungry for
more.
Anything that is live and public, put in a link. Anything that isn't,
at least put some screenshots, or even better, a screen movie showing
some interaction with the application.
If you squint at it hard enough, even the most desperately non-profit
technology application can be made analogous to a commercial one. The
trick is in how you look at it, who you define as the customer, what
sort of "profit" your application was able to make, etc.
Hope this helps,
Walter
On Jul 25, 2007, at 1:31 PM, John-Scott Atlakson wrote:
Hello all,
I've been working for a non-profit for the last couple of years, in
which time I've taught myself web development using RoR (of course),
but also Zope/Plone (not my choice) and Django. I'm now looking to
transition into the for-profit world so I have a fighting chance at
handling my impending student loan payments.
I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've never put together a 'professional'
resume before and I'm unsure what's the expected way to present my
skills. Previous resumes were just simple single-page overviews of my
work history to indicate I wasn't a bum. But now I want to present
myself specifically as a web developer. Should I list each site I've
worked on and have bulleted highlights of what I did? Or is that TMI
for a resume? Or should that info be factored out into a 'portfolio'
(and what would a portfolio look like in contrast to a resume)?
I don't have a CS or relevant degree (BA in philosophy, so lucrative),
so I'm probably aiming for a 'junior developer' territory to get my
foot in the door (just mentioning it if that should be a factor in how
I pitch things). Anyone willing to volunteer a resume for a guiding
example? I really get stumped when it comes time to toot my own horn,
but I need to get over that soon ;)
Thanks,
John-Scott
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