Your Resume Review

You’re clearly at an early stage of your career. However, this is an excellent stage to be considering how best to structure your resume and how to include more in it for the future, as time goes by. You have the beginnings of a good ‘story’ to your resume, but the issues I can see are:

• The colors of your fonts and background on your resume should compliment it, not take the focus away from the content. The wrong combination of colors fonts and dark background can make it difficult to read your resume and look unprofessional.
• Your professional summary does not include how you can help employers achieve their goals, with no measurable values.
• The ’professional experience’ section is very visible, correctly beginning after the summary, skills, and education sections
• ’Education and professional training’ is good to see, and easily scannable.
• The ’skills’ section doesn’t fully showcase your capabilities.
• Your soft skills are not presented – these are crucial.
• Your personal qualities are mixed in with your skills, creating an impression of confusion.
• The keywords you need to show are generally absent.

• Use a professionally formatted resume template with the right fonts in a smart way. Your resume A is a marketing tool designed to capture attention and get you to the next stage. We can help you choose the right resume template.
• Your career summary shouldn’t be a long list of everything you’ve done; it should be a refined list of skills and experiences that demonstrate you’re a fit for their job. Include any relevant metrics and data like, Educated 10+ in Cyber Forensics and Pen Testing… %, etc. This helps your resume stand out.
• Include the keywords specifically relevant to the opportunity you are applying for.
• Move ’Key Projects’ section after the ’Education section’
• Ensure that you provide the informative depth for when the reader reads properly.
• Structure your content to clearly show that you are one of the leading applicants, in comparison to other likely applicants who will probably be similar to you.

Professional summary section

• Use the Ad or job spec as a guide for what extra to include in this section.

Employment history section

• For each employer, say one or two lines about them, to show the scale of your responsibilities, relative to the next job you are applying for.
• Briefly express the scope of your work in 2 or 3 lines maximum.
• Then use a few bullet points to show your achievements/value delivered in that role.
• In each bullet point, try to focus on describing your quantifiable achievements, not just duties and job responsibilities.
• Use the Problem-Action-Result (PAR) method to describe your success.
• Briefly explain (a short paragraph or a few bullets) the scope of your role.
• Strive to reduce unnecessary detail – people broadly know what a recruiter does, so only focus on what they want to see by using the ad as a guide.
• Always use the ad or person specification as your guide. Look at what they want, then showcase yourself as that person.

Other sections

• The categories you already have are good for your stage, subject to comments on the changes above.

Visual Presentation and Organization

• Your basic layout and sequence of sections are good, but a combination of colors fonts and dark background can make it difficult to read your resume and look unprofessional.
• The one - two page resume is good for your stage.

Style

• First-person is great – you’re selling yourself, not someone else. Extend that into the professional experience section too.
• Relatively short paragraphs are good.
• Use of bullets is good.

Resume Writing

• Work to show more of yourself and what you can deliver if an employer takes you on.

In conclusion

• You should have confidence that you already have some skills and experience that is transferrable but always think about how you can increase this and take action to do that.
• You can’t win everything as so much depends on the ad, the reader, and the specific competition so it’s all about relentlessly working to improve the odds in your favor with every word, sentence, and bullet point on the resume.
• Make sure you incorporate relevant keywords. Pick these up from the ad. Prioritize these and make sure to show the highest priority ones prominently and in the correct sections.