4 Keys to Creating an Interview-Winning Information Technology Resume

Despite being some of the brightest problem solvers walking around at many companies, IT employees often have a hard time translating their skills onto a resume. Information technology employees sometimes assume that they can load up their resumes with technological terms and industry jargon—not realizing that the first one or two people who read that resume probably won’t understand anything it says.

Include the appropriate industry keywords

If you’re applying for a technology position in a larger company, chances are that someone in the HR department (in an entry-level role) will be screening your resume before it ever hits the desk of anyone in a technology role. Although the hiring manager will certainly understand the specific programming languages and software you’ve used, the HR screener may very well just be matching up keywords. So how do you write a resume that will sail through this screening process?

Talk about the end result

The initial readers of your resume aren’t as interested in how you’ve done things in the past as they are in what you’ve actually done. Did you create a Web site that saved your company $50,000 a year in outsourced expenses? Did you administer a company network that successfully protected confidential information for 5,000 customers? Did you supervise an IT department responsible for every single piece of computer equipment in a 500-employee company? Regardless of how you went about it, results make sense to just about everyone.

Include a technology skills section

If you are applying for a “worker bee” sort of technology job, such as Web developer, you will want to be very specific about the different types of development programs in which you’ve been trained or certified. If your career has progressed to an executive level, such as chief technology officer, you will want to focus more on your success stories.

Strike a balance

The key to a readable IT resume is to strike a balance between identifying overall results and achievements, while providing enough specifics for your document to appeal to both an HR screener and a technology hiring manager. Once you get into an interview, you and the hiring manager can go crazy with the details of which platforms and programming languages and software you used to achieve your results. The key to getting that interview is describing your accomplishments in a language that your audience can understand!