How To Craft A Strong Information Technology Resume

How do you get hiring managers to say “I want that person on my team!”? It’s all about your experience and writing your resume in a way that showcases your skills as the right candidate for each employer.

1. List Your Current & Past Responsibilities

In this section of your resume, you should make a list of your most important responsibilities. Hiring managers have limited time and often judge your resume within seconds. Make those seconds count by starting each bullet point with a verb, then include a power word.

For example, your number one task may be “Performed (verb) successful (power word) weekly vulnerability assessments” or “Assisted networking administrators and cloud engineers”.

However, you’ll need more than just verbs and power words. You should quantify each responsibility to add more value to your statement. By pairing data with your responsibilities, you will help hiring managers see the results related to your work.

2. Describe Each Task In One or Two Sentences

After you’ve listed your responsibilities, add a short description to show your accomplishments with your current or past employer and include quantitative metrics when possible.

Following the previous example, your new bullet point will read along the lines of “Performed successful weekly pentests resulting in 1,200 vulnerabilities found and fixed” or “Assisted the networking administrators and cloud engineers to improve current processes and controls“.

3. Research Your Aspiring Employer

Researching your aspiring employer will help you tailor your resume in a way that will resonate with those involved in the hiring process. For example, during your research, you might identify areas of improvement within the organization. With this knowledge, you can highlight the responsibilities you’ve had in the past that will not only showcase your skills, but how you can be an asset to their organization by making an immediate impact.

4. Build Your Personal Brand

Building your personal brand is becoming increasingly more common, and can be of great value when trying to prove you are the right fit for a role. You can build your personal brand by blogging, through social media, getting involved on networking sites or by attending events.

If you’ve written articles in the past that are related to the job you are applying for, you will want to add those links to your application. This will reinforce that the knowledge listed on your resume is real while helping establish credibility and thought leadership. Similarly, if you are active on a professional social media account, you should include links to your profiles, which will showcase your involvement in the Information Technology community and desire to continue learning outside of the workplace.

5. Showcase Your Skills

While experience might have the most impact on your resume, it’s good to focus on your skills as well; especially if you’re just getting started in your career. In this case, you will want to thoroughly list your professional and soft skills.

For example, if you’re applying to become a Cyber Security consultant, and you have experience writing because you blog, then you might want to add how your skills acquired by this activity helped you write spotless PenTest reports that clients appreciate and understand.