How To Make Your Engineering Resume Standout
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How To Make Your Engineering Resume Standout
Engineering Career Blog
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How To Make Your Engineering Resume Standout
Written by Diane Karch-Osowski on Jul. 25th 2021
What does data do for your Resume?
In this post, I want to talk about the importance of having data on your resume. This is great news because as engineers, we love data. We live in a world of data, so now put that on your resume.
I still see many resumes come across my desk of technical people and in their experience section, after they list the employer and their title, they list a bunch of boring bullet points consisting of just basic tasks that don't really tell me a story about who they are, and what you can do. Did you just passively participate in meetings or did you achieve things?
Choose the right words
What hiring managers want to see are the data points. Tell them a little more about those tasks that you did, it's all about the story, so if you have a task where it just says, “I use CATIA to create drawings”, it's not as spicy, it just doesn't have enough oomph.
Tell them a story!
But if you put, “I created a hundred drawings in CATIA in two days with zero defects”, that helps to create a story because they’ll say “Oh my gosh, you're so efficient, you were able to do it in a quick fashion with high quality”.
Or maybe you put in dollar amounts, “I helped institute an improvement in the process and we saved the company $50,000”, that translates a story to the hiring manager saying “Aha, they understand we're in this for business, they understand the value of a dollar and how their work translates to dollars”.
So, do you see where I'm going with this, it's about the stories you want to translate.
What gets employers attention:
Your achievements
The problems you can solve for the hiring manager
It's super important to have data in those sections, it just really brings to life what you can do for that hiring manager and for that company.
My advice to you is, go back, look at your resume, and check out those experience sections. Do you have data listed? If not, go and gather the data, whether from a previous or current job, look at the tasks, and quantify them. Maybe look at the budget you're affecting and describe your impact. Gather those numbers and put them into your resume.
If you find you are having a hard time adding data and perfecting your bullet points, then check out my e-book "Resume Secrets Every Engineer Needs To Know", I have a whole section on crafting great bullet points using my easy to use secret formula.
Bonus Tip: Percentages vs. Dollar Amounts
As a side note, not every company wants you to share dollar amounts that you saved; a hundred thousand dollars. What you can do in that case is turn the dollars savings into a percentage. Say you reduce the operating budget by 52%, something like that. That way you can get around actually listing dollars if the company is not happy with people sharing specific financials.
Until next time,
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