I had a long-term task for myself to update my resume this fall. I was ready to move on to a new job and ended up with a successful job search. I got 3 library books on resume writing and used some new tools to help with the job search. Here are some tips that I think are important when looking for a job.

Working on You

• You gotta inventory your skills and figure out what your gaps are.
  
• Look on the job boards, are there a few things consistently stopping you from applying? J2EE, Ruby, XML? For me it was XML, I've done some here and there but not enough in my opinion to put it on the resume. So, I took a class and played with it on my own.
  
• It's good to interview about once a year. Even if you aren't looking for another job it's good to get out there so you don't get too stale. I once knew a business owner that encouraged his guys to interview once a year to keep them sharp. Sometimes you get affirmation that you are where you belong.
  
• It helps to love what you do. If you're passionate about the field, let it show through.
  
• Read My Job Went to India! This book is essential reading for planning the rest of your career.
  
• You don't have to manage the Linux kernel to get Sourceforge to give you a project account. If you're playing with technology and APIs put your code on Sourceforge so that a potential employer can look at your code examples.
  

The Resume

• Understand that the resume is something that gets you an interview.
  
• Assume you are sitting in a stack with 20 other resumes, the person reading them is bored and wants to be doing something else. Remove any fluff in your resume.
  
• Never lie on a resume. I've interviewed people that had Linux on their resume, I asked them what distro and they weren't sure. That's really bad.
  
• Make sure you can answer those low hanging fruit questions on your resume. If you say you know the 7 Layer OSI Stack, make sure you can rattle off every layer when asked.
  
• I'm a big fan of a top Summary of Qualifications section at the top of your resume. It lists 5-8 bullet points that you want the reader to get above anything else.
  
• Following the summary of qualifications I list skills. Lesser proficiency goes lower and to the right.
  
• If you have multiple job titles with the same employer make sure you format it such that it doesn't look like you're a job-hopper. Showing increased responsibilities is good.
  
• The big challenge in the experience is to translate what you have done to something relevant to the future employer (sometimes this just means buzzword compliance). For example, I wrote a servlet that took in XML as part of the HTTP request and sent an XML reply so that a VisualBasic program could have access to our Java services. We didn't call it REST at the time but that's what it is. Another example, we aggregated domains in the enterprise and wrapped them with J2EE and SOAP so that applications would have a consistent source for data. We didn't call it SOA at the time but (tada) that's what we were doing and now it's a term that resonates with people.
  
• Don't make the reader wade through proprietary nomenclature about what you worked on. Make it relevant in terms of technology, frameworks, patterns and relevant in terms of what it did for the business. I worked on something called LID, no one knows what LID is, no one cares. On my resume I say this: Brought the first (2001) and most used enterprise SOA service (J2EE Stateless Session Beans & SOAP) at Level 3 through it's entire software development life cycle to production (still running).
  

The technology/ tools

• Make sure that you and your resume are google-able.
  
• To that end, get your resume online and keep it somewhere. I have had my resume in the same place online for over five years. I also provide the URL on any other format of my resume.
  
• Make sure they can get to different formats of your resume. You gotta have a Word version, I used to refuse to provide a Word version out of principal. Now I'm smarter. I think HTML, Word and PDF are fine. You could also do RTF and even TXT.
  
• Consider using http://docs.google.com/
  to keep your resume in one place where you can always edit it and save it as multiple file types.
  
• Use an RSS reader to aggregate job postings to one easy to read place.
  
• Subscribe to RSS feeds from lots of job sites; Dice, Monster, SimplyHired, Indeed. You can set up detailed, local searches as RSS feeds and have them all pushed to your reader.
  
• Read local user groups.
  
• When you're done updating your resume post it on Monster. This is no joke, post it on monster.com.