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Discussion on: Do not put skill bars on your resume!

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

Rating your own skill this precisely is an invitation to the dunning-kruger effect. You will rarely know how much you're missing until you're getting very close to really mastering something.

And what does the end of a progress bar even represent?

Proficiency? Then you shouldn't have anything on your resume that's not a full bar anyway. There's no point in advertising that you've heard of a technology but can't even reliably work with it on your own.

Or is it mastery? Then how can anybody trust your evaluation of your own skills? Once again, this metric is very susceptible to the dunning-kruger effect. The further you are from mastering a skill, the less reliably you can tell what's left for you to learn.

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tim012432 profile image
Timo

I completely agree with you.

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hexdom profile image
Helge-Kristoffer Wang

Would it be fair to use keywords like; 'beginner', 'intermediate', 'expert' and so on instead? At least that wouldn't make it seem like you know everything, but tells the reader something about what level you consider yourself to be in.

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tim012432 profile image
Timo

I personally would prefer such keywords as description.

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anuranroy profile image
Anuran Roy

@darkwiiplayer I completely agree with you on this one. Some of my friends barely know HTML/CSS and say that they know Frontend Dev. They even rate themselves as 4/5 often on these bars.

While many seniors I see often rate themselves as a 2/5 or at max a 3/5.