Question:
I am an embedded software engineer. I wanted help in writing my
resume.
Answer:
-Keep it to one page. Include education, experience, special qualifications
(citizenship, security clearances now and in the past, etc).
Did I mention the one-page thing? Offer to provide more detail if needed.
-Whatever you do, DON'T include a paragraph that simply lists every and each
OS, RTOS, word processor, uC emulator, PCB layout application, FPGA design
application, software metrics generator, or other development and test tool
that you may have worked with, talked about, seen on a billboard, dreamt of,
etc. You get the idea. I've read a few resumes over the course of my
career, and those types of resumes are tiresome and really easy to ignore.
By listing all of these applications in a single paragraph, without any
context, it gives the impression that the author of the resume is trying to
project the impression that they are masters of all of these applications,
but we all know that this probably isn't the case.
Give context to your skills in your resume. Answer the question "How did
you use these tools and what problems did you solve?" or something like
that.
All of these things, plus stapling a crisp, new, multicolored US $20 to your
resume will help your resume a lot!
-You're going to get many conflicting opinions on this.
Depends on your audience.
Agents generally stuff thousands of CVs in a database and tell a program to
pick ones with relevant key words. So for them, DO stick in relevant key
words.
Employers expend seconds per CV - they get them in junk mail quantities.
So I would go for the key words on page one in big type.
Make it short and sharp: brevity is the soul of wit.
Don't dilute the impact of your strong key skills by padding it with lots of
minor skills.
Make detail shorter with age, old skills tend to be faded skills.
Two pages seems fine: but the first page has to grab the reader otherwise
they won't bother turning it over.
By all means paint yourself in a good light: even failures can be
educational.
In one short job I did, I learnt that if I can't get a chip feature to work
fairly quickly, then it may well be that the chip makers screwed up big
time!
