What is the difference between a bio-data and a resume?
The CV or a resume is the one which gives a technical description of your experience, your knowledge and the trouble shooting you have been doing or you did as compared to bare facts of Bio-Data which is nothing but a cut and dry facts of personal data. In IT your Bio-data is not important at all.
If you really want a good job you need to know how to write a resume of your professional experience and how you can impress the employer!
You must know that when a job is advertised in a News Daily (even if it means , for example , a high end IT job like sys admin or DBA) a few thousand resumes would land in the recruiter’s office!! You believe me when I say this because I am one of those who sorted out this mass of CV at one point of time.
If this is the case how do you get noticed???
How do you get a chance to be interviewed? Put off for the time being the idea of a job but first of all get an interview.
You must know that many a resume simply end up in a waste paper basket. They tear it off and throw away the moment they do not like it. Some resumes attract attention and stay on even though you may not be called for an interview for the job advertised or the current job.
A resume will not attract attention because of your qualification!! So if you are BITS pilani guy, do not expect that you will get a call for an interview just because you had written that fact in your resume.
An employer first of all sees where you worked before, and that really attracts!
But the most important one proves to be your explanation of trouble shooting skills , you exhibited while on the job. This really makes a great difference and if you are very good at it, you might probably get a job itself.
In an interview nobody can know everything about you.
In the resume when you gave a detailed account of how you solved a problem ( in the job ) what technical knowledge you had used and what type of experience proved to be success in that problem area is what really counts in a resume.
You must be able to defend yourself if a discussion follows your resume in an interview. Every bit of it you should know of what you had written and every technical bit, you must know to explain in a short and easily understandable way.
Even if a resume has all this and yet you are not called for an interview , do not get discouraged and be assured that you are on the right track , you shall be noticed sooner or later.
Your resume should have following sections:
1) Trouble shooting skills.
And a detailed explanation of these skills in real life working conditions.
2) The logo of your certification MUST be on the top of your resume, even if they were all not relevant to your job.
3) Your achievements
This may have been noticed by your former employer or other organisations. Even if they were not noticed, the achievements from your point of view MUST be explained as a separate section which should ’’popup out” of resume to get noticed.
4) Your R&D , (the research and development ) efforts you had put forth and the results there on should be mentioned on a separate section.
If it is only an unconventional application of a fundamental science or technique applied using normal utilities these should also be considered as R &D and must be mentioned under separate section.
5) Your understanding of the subject.
Please remember it can be different from others. For example a DBA can be on different platforms and different types of databases for example RAC, and Distributed databases. Same is the case with a sys admins and programmers and so on.
What you should NOT write:
1) Your age.
2) complaints about the former employer 3) your failures at the last stages of an R&D effort or a project 4) your inability to attend to a job because of personal reasons etc., 5) your hobbies like mimicry or magic which you had exhibited all over the world etc., (better keep those secrets with you unless those are the requirements)
The mistakes you should NEVER do:
1) SPELLING MISTAKES. Almost all employers hate spelling mistakes and grammatical errors!! If you use sentences like ’’He do not know’’ , ’’gr8’’ , ’’rocks’’, ’’sucks’’, etc., be sure that your resume will be thrown in to the waste paper basket even if it means a technical job. Such a language throws a poor light on you. It is because people believe that those who write excellent language (not speaking) also have good knowledge!!! Unbelievable? But true!!
2) Explaining or considering routine jobs or techniques as great jobs you are doing?!! In my experience I found many candidates write their resume exactly in this manner !!!
3) Explaining a project in great detail while your ’’work’’ in that mentioned at the very heading itself in just one line or even in one sentence!!!
(This is mostly the case with IT candidate resume almost 99%)
It is not the project or its number of modules in it which is important. Even a donkey of an employer knows that there will be a team to execute this.
You should explain what were the problems encountered and how they were solved, circumvented or redesigned etc even if you as a one person did not solve all that.
After writing a resume do not show it to your friends and keep it online.
A resume had better kept confidential rather than exhibited.
If you are applying for jobs on line, you should always attach a word document and do not send an online resume which you had saved in job web sites. I know that 99% employers do not like the format of resume saved by online dot coms.
I wish you best of luck.