Are you being too vague in your Electrical Engineer Resume

When you are trying to compress an entire career into a four pages its always going to be a struggle. There is a line between too much content and not enough content. It’s a fact that due to the amount of people in the work force when a job is advertised an employer or recruiter could see over 200 resumes a day.

With this many resumes flooding in the door, its unreasonable to think they will read every one cover to cover.



The best advice I have is to compress the information in your Electrical Engineer resume to 4 pages and no more.

In the battle to compress information into a few pages it’s very tempting to generalise your achievements in the sentences you construct. You might, for example be very tempted to use a sentence like "Worked on the XZY project". Of course you know what you meant when you wrote it, but would someone who is not familiar with the industry know? Chances are they wouldn’t. There is a lot of detail wrapped up in a sentence like that. It is your job to point out the most exciting elements of that sentence and leave the uninteresting bits out. By way of example "Worked on the XZY project" could become "As a Electrical Engineer I was a critical resource for a $9M dollar 99% high availability system for ensuring the processing of widget XYZ". Much better!



The Struggle

Of course the struggle is, how much details is too much? Generally you need to show as much detail as you can around the scale and importance of the systems you’re worked on. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to generate the right amount of detail in your job descriptions:

-How important was the system the company was it critical?

-How large was the customer base?

-How much was the system worth? Was it a super expensive company asset?

You might be thinking at this point that expanding all your sentences with answers to those questions might add too much content to your resume. However, ask yourself this question when you are reviewing your resume:

If an outsider read my resume, could they quickly and easily tell what I actually did?



On resume size

Recruiters are looking for skill and competency, not a perfect resume size. You don’t want a 100 page document, but if you have experience you wish to describe you don’t want 1 page either. I reckon 4 pages is about right, 2 is perfect but can be difficult to achieve!

If you avoid making blanket statements in your Electrical Engineer resume and sell the benefits of your experience so a recruiter will discover its easier to read and naturally put you on the top of the pile!



Finally, a dedicated site with resume resources specifically for Electrical Engineers. If you think creating an Electrical Engineers resume is a chore, ease the pain with some writing tips and tricks at http://electricalengineerresume.net. Find ways to create a more powerful resume faster and easier.