My software engineering resume has generally been well received and is arranged like this:
Career Profile/Executive Summary/Whatever you want to call this:
- List four or five single sentence points that consider your best (sellable) features and give a good overview of what benefits/strengths you will bring to a company. An example point would go something like this: "Software engineer with X years of experience defining requirements, designing systems, and developing algorithms, specializing in Y industries."
Skills Section:
- Important to have this up near the front and not hidden at the back. List a point with languages, a point with special software, and a point with operating systems you've used at a job. This section is usually quickly scanned through by an employer to verify that the basic requirements of the job are met . . . so make it easy for them to scan. Don't add too much information here.
Experience:
- List your employers and dates in reverse chronological order
- For each employer, list your duties/tasks/accomplishments. For each duty/task/accomplishment, indicate and quantify why and how this was a good thing for the company. (Rather than 'Automated build procedures' put 'Automated build procedures, reducing turn-around time to perform releases by 70%'. Rather than 'Worked on X project design' put 'Worked on X project, delivered successful design changes that allowed project to meet Y release deadline'.)
Education:
- Name of your school, date of graduation
- a quick sentence about something impressive that you did that's related to the field you're in (if your marks were impressive, maybe mention what they were)
A Note About Length:
- Don't put stuff in there that's just filler. It's not impressive, it's boring and will turn off an employer. Every point in the resume taken on it's own should read as something about you that's awesome for a software company. I've been working for ten years, and have a two page resume. I've seen some good three page resumes. It's very, very, very rare that a four page resume is good and filler-free.
- What I do when writing a resume is make a 5 page one, then keep cutting/optimizing parts until it's been stripped down to two pages. This is a painful process, but makes sure that you are highlighting just the very best of your talents.
