Creating a Tech CV
Insights on mastering the job hunt, from my experiences as Careers Coach at Makers
As they say in the careers team: “Always be hustling”.
There is truth here. Even when you just had a truly great interview and suspect the job’s in the bag, be aware of that pesky but delightful thought that you can sit back and wait for a possible job-offer to come through.
Don’t fall for that mind trick, jedis.
You should always keep your nose to the ground to sniff out new opportunities. This usually means looking outside Makers and most likely at the stage, you’ll be asked for a CV.
Here is my advice for CVs to use outside of Makers, from the FAQs I get. This is a suggested format and please feel free to break any or all of these rules if you have a good argument to do so.
Can I Copy and Paste my Github CV?
I don’t recommend you do this.
As Makers, you have buckets of personality our Hiring Partners like to see but outside we don’t know how warm Hiring Managers are to this style outside of our magical walls.
I suggest you have your own CV which should be similar to the format you might be more used to. Typically your non-Makers CV will put more emphasis on competency with tech languages and your previous history.
What format should I use?
Keep your CV to one page if possible. A lean and relevant CV shows you understand the requirements of the role and care enough to put the time in to craft your CV towards that understanding.
Remember Employers and Hiring Managers skim read CVs. Including only what is relevant will give the reader a much easier time with your CV and leave a more positive first impression as a result.
You should amend your non-Makers CV for every role you apply to. Start-Ups need a set of skills that are different to consultancies and different again to large and well-established tech teams. Use the job description as your cue to discover what each company is looking for.
What exactly should I include?
Profile or About Me: Include a Profile at the top to explain your careers change and to summarise the key skills and experience you bring.
Include Makers: Avoid explaining we are the leading tech boot camp in Europe but you can hyperlink to our Employer Page.
Include degrees and summarise important work experience: Your CV should emphasise the facts and skills you think an employer will be most interested in. This shouldn’t be all technical, tech companies value diversity of thought and experience and will be interested in your history.
Show yourself as a developer (you’re not ‘aspiring’, this is it): Describe yourself as a Ruby/JS/Front-End/Full-Stack/Back-End Dev with the ability to pick up new skills fast. Why would an employer want to invite you for interview? Avoid overuse of descriptive adjectives and writing too much about what you want. Focus on what you bring.
List Your Coding Experience: Your Makers experience should come next with a list of 3–5 projects including languages and frameworks. Anything that demonstrates your commitment to a coding career can be included here too. This could include meet-ups you enjoy or hackathons you’ve contributed to.
List Your Work Experience: Use a clear format for each role — one line about what that company was and/or your core responsibility for context. Bullet point core skills and achievements and pick only the ones that demonstrate new skills or are particularly relevant to tech. Order the bullet points in order of relevance to the role.
Other useful things to mention:
- Times you used tech to automate functions;
- Leading Teams;
- Presenting Skills;
- Getting Things Done;
- Written Skills;
- Sales or Client facing skills;
- Anything requiring high levels of attention to detail.
List Your Previous Education
If you have an Undergrad Degree start there. If you have A-Levels and no undergrad degree start there. If you finished formal education at 16 list any other relevant qualifications.
Don’t list every certificate you’ve picked up along the way unless they are extremely relevant to the job you will be doing.
Hobbies
If you have space on the page, you can include a line on outside interests but don’t go into detail.
References
It has been common for CVs to contain the standard line ‘References Available on Request’ but it’s less common to include it now because it’s assumed that references will be requested at some point along the process.
Final Check List
- Come back to your CV the next day and check for spelling, grammar errors and readability;
- The first half of the page should be focused on your skills as a developer and past-projects;
- You include 3–5 Tech Projects;
- If you have a blog or portfolio website include it at the top;
- Make sure you don’t have time post-education for you haven’t accounted for in your work history (a mystery six months).
You Don’t Need To Include:
- Your address (an email address and mobile number will suffice)
- A photo (while it’s not completely strange to do this in tech as it is in other industries it’s certainly not a requirement)
- A static evaluation of your skills (e.g ‘I am intermediate at JavaScript and expert at leadership’. At this stage, it’s much better to show your tech skills within projects and focus on your potential and enthusiasm for code. Stay teachable)
You Definitely Don’t Need To Include:
- Gender
- Date of Birth
- Nationality
On Templates
You can find CV-building templates online and even buy them. I haven’t seen one yet that I think is outstanding but I’m not totally against them. If you have Photoshop skills or design skills, thinking about creating a template is another good way to demonstrate your design skills.
It’s more important to think about the value each word adds, keeping some white space on the page and consistent formatting.
It is good practice to work on MS Word (or similar) that you can save and send as a PDF.
It’s also good practice to remember the person you send it to will probably see the same you save it as, so think about giving a name that will help them. ‘Becks.Hookham.CV’ rather than ‘CV Draft 3’.
