With today’s highly competitive technical market and hundreds of new candidates entering this industry every single day, how can you be sure that your technical resume will stand out? Included is a brief overview of what your resume SHOULD be "doing" for you, as well as a few good techie tips to get you started.

Working – Your resume has a job to do, so make it work! Today’s resumes are more of a marketing advertisement for who you are and what you can offer, rather than just a professional list of what you’ve done. You will be competing against hundreds of equally qualified candidates so you absolutely HAVE to set yourself above the competition through an effective combination of content, verbiage and presentation. Think a bit "outside" the box and expand on your responsibilities by demonstrating how those activities contributed to results!

Focusing – Who are you, where do you want to go and how do you want to be recognized? If you’re a senior manager (or aiming to get there), you don’t want a resume filled with information about your help-desk skills, programming languages or debugging strengths! Conversely, you can’t really talk about becoming the CTO without outlining the skills OTHER than your technical expertise, such as project management, team leadership, systems administration, IT needs assessment, etc. If your goal is to remain / become more of a hands-on worker, then it’s fine to provide a specific section that outlines the primary skills specific to your industry, but not necessarily all of them. For example, if your goal is to become a network administrator, focus more on those relevant skills (network planning, systems integration, software configuration) and NOT the years you spent learning COBAL. Remember – relevance is key and some people find it helpful to refer to a specific job ad/posting before writing their resume to make sure that the resume and requirements are both speaking the same language!

Profiling – A professional profile works much better than just a plain old objective; better yet, it’s not as limiting. You can still be clear about your job goals, but a summary or qualifications statement will immediately help set you apart. See the below "Before and After" of this approach.

1. Objective: A position as a systems analyst where I can grow professionally in a challenging organization. (Yawn)
2. Profile: Experienced systems analyst and technical support manager supported by the ability to drive system design and architecture improvements to meet evolving business needs. Proven ability to determine technical, operational and financial viability of technical solutions as they relate to business objectives.

Marketing – Rather than outlining a litany of responsibilities such as troubleshooting, developing and building, SELL those abilities through action verbs and results. Compare the following two statements:

1. Implement new credit reporting system.
2. Implemented new credit reporting system which helped reduce billing error rates by 25% and eliminated need for overtime.

See? You’ve just made your system implementation skills much more exciting and valuable to the reader!

Formatting – Not only do your words have to drive the call to action (i.e., the call to your phone!) but your presentation has to impress the reader enough to capture that immediate attention. Using a template just doesn’t work – do you know how many people use the “Word” templates to create their resumes? Can you imagine wading through hundreds of them on a daily/weekly basis? Additionally, you can be a bit more flexible with your page length. While it’s not necessary for an entry-level computer programmer to have more than one page, it’s quite possible for a CIO to utilize three or four. As for design issues, you certainly don’t want to submit your resume on flowery paper (while innovative, probably won’t work), you can use nice formatting lines that separate your education, experience, summary and skills sections so that it’s easier to read and see "what you’re all about."

Hopefully, these tips will streamline your resume process. However, if you find yourself pulling out your hair or banging on those computer keys as you try to find just the right verbiage, you may wish to consider utilizing a professional resume service.

About the Author: Kim Little