Your "Professional Experience" listing should be the largest section of your resume. Here are some general guidelines to consider.

Your job experience should be listed with the most recent job first. Be sure to include months as well as years when dating the length of your employment engagements. Place the date in the left hand margin alongside the company name and job title.

Use the full names of the firms that you have worked for. Do not just say "major bank." If you do not use the full name of your current firm, you increase the possibility that your resume will end up on your current boss' desk.

Supply several bullet points of information on each job. Outline the highlights of your employment there.

Each job listed should include some details about the business line you supported, the technology you used, and your contribution to the project. Details of your role should be provided, including which portions of the Full Project Life Cycle were conducted, who the end users were, and your level of contact with those users, and the success or anticipated success of the completed project.

Be specific about which technology was employed where. Do not be afraid of repetition. If you used C++ and JAVA in each of your projects, state it for each project. Otherwise, in the 10-30 seconds scan your resume gets, your technical achievements will be overlooked or marginalized.

Bold technology terms.

Focus on accomplishments not duties, and be very specific.

Consider the following two statements:

Responsible for the roll-out of 40 Sun Sparc(Solaris) workstations by 2 UNIX administrators

Rolled out 40 Sun Sparc(Solaris) workstations.
Led two junior administrators who assisted in the project.

The second example focuses on accomplishments, and by doing so, specifically defines the parameters of the position's responsibility. There is no ambiguity as to whether the project was completed successfully. Furthermore, the second phrase directly states that the author was hands-on in the roll out, whereas the first statement could imply that the author was a hands-off project leader who held a strictly supervisory role and is not the hands-on person they are looking to hire.

Use action verbs to describe your background. This will help you in focusing on accomplishments, not duties. Use "supervised" instead of "project leader of." Used "created" or "developed" instead of "responsible for development."

Beware of boastful job titles. Use your functional job title, such as senior developer or project manager. Titles such as VP or AVP vary in meaning from company to company. In some companies, senior hands-on technologists can be VP's. In other companies, only managers of large groups attain that title.

If you are a technologist coming from a small firm, be especially wary. Refrain from using CIO or Head of Technology as your title. Hiring managers seeing these types of titles will classify you as someone who would not be happy being 5 steps removed from the CIO in a big firm, even if it means overseeing twice the staff and triple the budget of the small shop. If you were a CIO in a small shop, the most equivalent, translatable title would be project manager. Remember, always put yourself in the shoes of your audience. In large firms, senior project managers may lead 20 people. CIOs are in charge of hundreds.

Benefit from redundancy. If you are a specialist in rolling out NT based trading floors, and have rolled out four of them for different business lines — list each of them as a separate bullet! Show your reader that you didn't just do something once and are now claiming expertise. Prove that you are an expert.

Avoid listing part-time consulting assignments performed simultaneously with your full-time employments. Your future employer wants to know that when you work for your new company, they will have your full attention.

If you are a consultant, list your consulting jobs under the generic title, "independent consultant." Accompany the title with the date representing the period of time in which you were a consultant, regardless of the number of individual contracts or clients. Put that all-encompassing date in the left hand margin and the sub-dates (individual contracts) on the right hand margin.

For each contract assignment, follow this simple format:

	1/97 - 12/97	INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT
		Database Administrator stationed at Company One	1/97 - 6/97
		Duties included...
		Database Administrator stationed at Company Two	7/97 - 12/97
		Functions performed at Company two included...

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