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28/01/08 CV For Tech: Professional Experience
SINGAPORE - Part II (see all parts). You used to find my work experience as the last thing on my CV. This was part of the school template that assumed you had only got 2 weeks of internship and a summer on a newsagents till. Very quickly my section “WORK EXPERIENCE” was renamed “PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE” and brought to the very top under the opening statement.
I used to list all work experience I ever had (11 companies), this had to be good, no? It showed wide experience, young achievements. Wrong, it showed I was petty about things. I removed anything that made people imagine me as a 16 year old (more on this later in the Education section), they’re not looking to employ a 16 year old. Out came my transition year placement with one other…
Webfactory, Web Design (Work Experience), May 1999.
The next thing I did was to take out anything that was eclipsed by my latest job role - anything that was significantly overshadowed would not swing a vote, therefore it was a waste of the readers time. This got the chop with 3 other jobs…
MoreSoft Computers & IT Institute, Web & Graphic Designer , Summer 2001.
We’re building a Tech CV here, not a life story. Unrelated jobs should not come under professional experience. This came out with one other…
Kandersteg International Scout Centre, Switzerland. Rock Climbing & Mountain Guide, Summer 2002.
Out it came, but it went straight back in under INTERESTS & ACHIEVEMENTS. This experience is often my killer blow to the question “Can you give an example of leadership?”, while most applicants reel off about a team university project I can throw out a “When the visibility drops on a glacier, control & safe leadership of a large group is paramount” (more on that in the final section).
Now I was down to 3 out of 11 jobs worth mentioning. I was sure to show the variance of my work in Reuters, clearly display the dates, and importantly for me, the global locations.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Technical Graduate Scheme, Reuters Ltd.
- Chief Architecture Office, Asia. (Jan ‘08 - Aug ‘08, Singapore.)
- Technical due diligence reporting, fact-finding & interviews on emerging technologies.
- Investigation & delivery of strategy recommendations to business divisions.
- Management of a conducive environment for technical architect collaboration in Asia.
- Strategic Technology Relationship Programme. (Oct ‘07 - Jan ‘08, Canary Wharf, London.)
- Product training and on-the-ground organisation for 8 strategic partner companies at the Reuters Technology Summit, Bangkok, Thailand.
- Global strategy & cost recommendations for enterprise licensing of development tools.
- Business Analyst. (Sep ‘07 - Oct ‘07, Canary Wharf, London.)
- Campaign Logistics & coordination for the Reuters Messaging upgrade of 2000 small business clients.
- Analysis of alerting methods available to account managers to increase sales potential.
- Successful deployment of Webex online product demo tools for EMEA Account Managers.
- Operations Problem Analyst. (Apr ‘07 - Sep ‘07, Docklands Technical Centre, London.)
- Root cause analysis of operational problems to prevent recurrence. Cases represented at the ‘Global Service Forum’ following ITIL best practices.
- Problem coordinator management with process refinement, training & documentation provided to transition role to Bangkok, Thailand.
- Delivery of an operational incident report tool deployed to all Incident Control Centres & Problem Management teams globally.
- Global Operations Project Manager. (Oct ‘06 - Apr ‘07, Canary Wharf, London.)
- Coordinated the knowledge, service agreements and installation of ‘Tornado 2′ in EMEA. The 16 server system was duplicated in both production and assembly environments providing ‘Search & Content Technologies’ web-services for Reuters ‘Common Platform’.
- ‘Association of Project Management (APM)’ fundamentals of project management certification.
Ericsson LMI Network Management Research Centre. (May ‘05 - Oct ‘05. Dublin, Ireland.)
- A visualisation for a data-mining application was designed in Java. The application correlated cell network faults as connected nodes to aid the prediction of service outages.
Self-Employed, ByteSurgery.com. Dublin, Ireland.
- Development of PHP/MySQL web-applications for approximately 60 clients. Operating all aspects of this entrepreneurial venture, managing outsourced projects and business improvement.
- Creation of own-brand communities, social networks & blogs driven by online advertising revenue.
The most important parts about listing your professional experience are quantity & specifics. How many clients, what budget, what percentage of the budget, resources scale, geographic scale, importance. This is very different from leaving this information out… it’s not about impressing or boasting - it’s about when you leave blanks you suddenly become generic just like every other CV template.
-Robin-
(Image Credit: On the weekend I took a 6hr bus ride to the Petronas Towers, Kualar Lumpur, Malaysia. By Author.)
Tags: curriculum vitae, cv, cv for tech, General, job hunting, professional experience, resume
4 Comments
28/01/08 CV For Tech: Professional Experience | Business Credit Report
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Argh, I hate writing these things… Fortunately, I haven’t had to write a serious one for some years now.
Good to keep it updated though… nothing worse than having an old one and not remembering the finer points.
I’m a big fan of David J. Rice’s CV format: http://davidjrice.co.uk/assets/2008/1/10/cv.pdf
