DEV Community: Glen Bradley

6 Soft Skills You Should Put in Your IT Resume

Glen Bradley — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 06:06:29 +0000

Despite the upsurge of Information Technology or IT jobs in the past years, many applicants still struggle to get work in this field. They contend not only with new graduates, but also with seasoned employees looking for a better position or higher salary. To stand out from the pack, however, career experts advise job hunters to hone and highlight the skills demanded by employers. We, at Resume Professional Writers, just made a comprehensive resume analysis and identified the key soft skills most firms look for in a summary profile. Check out the result of our review.

Professional Resume Review: Must-Have IT Soft Skills
Based on our comprehensive resume analysis, employers hunt the following soft skills on most IT resumes. If you can include these abilities in your document, you will attract their attention and get higher chances of getting an interview.

Communication
With the huge variety of emails, proposals, and design documents a technology expert creates, written and verbal communication is essential. When you become a certified IT employee, you will often explain technical processes in clear, logical terms for employers and clients. You need to explain your ideas in a persuasive manner, too, to coax the others to finance and support your project.
Listening
As an IT expert, you must not only express your own ideas, you must listen to others, too. Pay attention to what your employer or the client needs so you can give them what they want.
Teamwork
Your ability to work well as part of a team is a valuable asset to any company. If you are applying for IT jobs that lists “team player” as a key skill, find ways to highlight your talents to make you stand out from your rivals. You may mention any “team player” award you have received or discuss projects you have delivered together with your team.
Leadership
Do not limit such skills to management experience or position. Even if you were not the manager or boss of your former department, you may still specify experiences you have had managing a project or a team. Being a project leader requires strong communication skills, the ability to delegate tasks, and a constant focus on the end goal. Make sure you underline these involvements in your application.
Creativity
Tech experts must expect and form solutions for potential IT problems and needs. This forward-thinking involves imagination and creative problem-solving. Employers, therefore, search for IT mavens who can come up with unique solutions.
Flexibility
IT specialists often face setbacks or sudden changes, like a last-minute issue with a vendor or a technical problem with their project. So learn to be flexible. Accept these changes and find creative solutions at once. Likewise, accept your client or boss’ feedback and advice. Listen to any comments they give and be open to making changes to meet their needs.

Comprehensive Resume Analysis: How to Show off Soft Skills
Do you need help including soft skills in your IT resume? Check out these tips:

Use the soft skills listed on the job post.
Employers often list the soft skills they look for in a candidate through their job posts. For instance, they may emphasize that a job hunter must be “positive and enthusiastic” or “results-oriented.” When you have identified these skills, put them in your resume. In this way, you tailor your resume for the position in advance. This technique is far more effective than sending every potential employer the same generic resume.
Give solid examples.
Simply listing the top IT soft skills on your resume are not enough; you need to support them with specific examples and proof, too. Do not just say you are “equipped with strong listening skills” or “have effective leadership traits.” Instead, explain how you used these skills and how they helped contribute to your former or existing employers’ success. Do not simply say you are “goal-driven” or “results-oriented.” Prove these competencies by including examples and facts that can support your claim. Think of a situation when your soft skills helped the firm fix a huge problem and yielded great results.

Was there a time you comforted an enraged customer and stopped him/her from canceling a big contract? Did you once save the company from losing a client with your excellent negotiation skills? Make sure you highlight these feats in your document.

Use action verbs related to your soft skills.
Among the resume mistakes job seekers commit is not using powerful verbs in their resumes. Besides helping you get through the applicant tracking system or ATS, action verbs can likewise aid you in expressing actions vividly. Keep in mind, you only have six seconds to impress your recruiter. Hence, using such verbs will help you explain your roles in a concise and impactful way.
Try to use quantitative examples.
Find examples of your soft skills if you want to impress your future employer. To prove that you are “detail-oriented,” for instance, stress a specific time when the company benefited from your skill. You may include, for example, the time you saved the company from losing a huge sum of money when you noticed a numerical error in a report.
Highlight your leadership qualities.
Leadership requires multiple soft skills. You cannot be a leader unless you know how to connect, listen, and deal with other people. Thus, stressing your leadership qualities in your resume can help you bring in essential soft skills into your application.

Answering the “How Can I Fix My Resume?” Question

Your resume will get you the interview. Thus, do your best to sell yourself so that when recruiters see it, they’ll initially consider you as the best candidate for the post. Make sure it’s up-to-date, undergone comprehensive resume analysis, and displays all your qualities and skills.

Soft skills may vary among firms and will depend on your intended job. Thus, do your research and identify what skills the firm needs before you write your application.

Do you need help in fixing your resume? Contact us for a free resume check or inspect our IT resume template to guide you pass a company’s resume scanner! If you can’t do it on your own, seek our resume writing services!

How Top Resume Writing Services Write an Engineering Resume

Glen Bradley — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 23:49:30 +0000

You’re the engineer everyone wants to be—young, competitive, and promising. A brilliant future awaits you, yet you left your job. Further, after almost five years of hiatus, you now want to return to the workforce. Maybe your friends force you to make a comeback, and you don’t know where to start. Thus, how can you prove your worth amid the stiff competition among engineers in the labor market? Will you hide your employment gap to boost your chances? Create a top engineering resume, one that will help relaunch your career. Below are techniques you can use in creating your application tool.

How to Notch a Top Engineering Resume

Use the right format.
With the noticeable gap in your employment record, the best resume format for you is functional because it highlights your skills, strengths, and personal qualities than your work experience. Since you want to continue on your career path, stress your technical and mechanical abilities to prove your engineering skills.
Tailor your resume to the job post.
Other desperate job seekers apply with several companies, often prompting them to create a generic resume. Besides, such a move isn’t good because your copy won’t grab the interest of the hiring manager. Hence, define your target job right from the start since engineering is a large field. Although your earlier experience gives a hint on your current pursuit, still it’s better to place your intended position. Then again, with a career tag under your contact information, it will be easy for the recruiter to see your intention.
Talk about your accomplishments.
Your past work as an aerospace engineer sounds cool if you’re part of a team that controls a robot in a space mission. Yet 15 others with almost the same experience are, likewise, applying for the job you want. So, how can you win over them? Place in your resume what you did to allow the robot’s movements. Besides, show the results of your hard work. This makes you a better candidate. Hence, when writing the experience section of your application tool, save a space for your major achievements. Better yet, place a separate section for career highlights.
Include the “essential” sections.
The best way to prove your knowledge and ability in the field is to add must-have sections. Rather, these include certifications, licenses, research, and publications. Further, adding a project list is a “booster.” Since engineering resumes are scientific, include them. These, along with your research projects and their descriptions, contributions to research papers, and grants won for engineering tasks, will help hiring managers gauge your qualifications.
Put keywords.
Buzzwords have four chief functions. In addition, they prove your knowledge and skills, strengthen your resume, help ease scanning, and make you visible online. Depending on your field, keywords for engineers vary. Likewise, common buzzwords are buildings, prototypes, procedures, test plans, tooling, structural design, and many others.
Improve readability of your piece.
Yes, engineers’ tasks involve complex procedures. Yet such isn’t a valid excuse to present a “complex” resume. Otherwise, make it readable.

— Use bullet points when listing your skills and/or job descriptions.
— Keep your information to the point to make scanning easy.
— Avoid any error.
— Keep a proper balance between texts and white spaces.
— Lessen, if not ditch, the design.

Prepare a strong profile summary. After writing every required section, go back to the top to add your summary. Further, this section includes most marketable qualities as an engineer. With this, start with strong adjectives for each of the five phrases. Besides, write only what describes yourself well.

Useful Tips
No matter how good you are as an engineer, your success as a candidate relies on how you listed your qualifications to get a job interview. So, focus on the positives. Despite the reason you left your earlier job, whether you resigned or the management forced you due to illness or jail time, keep such negatives off your resume. What you should do is stress your enthusiasm for the job. Tell who you are without regard for the passé one-page rule because engineers often have long copies.

Without stereotyping, engineers may have less marketing mindset to help sell themselves. As ironic as it may sound, you can’t “engineer” your resume well despite your knowledge on design.

Whether you follow these tips to produce a top engineering resume or seek professional help, target your copy for the job. If you chose the latter, hire us. We offer top resume writing services. At Resume Professional Writers, we deliver application documents that beat your imperfections as a worker. We excel at making resumes for candidates who want to return to the workforce.