A good buddy of mine, Andy, has just recently begun his very own adventure living in Asia. All of you travel fanatics out there might find his blog about life in China interesting. I’m sure you’ll be reading more about him on here at some point too; he plans to come and visit sometime before I leave Kyoto in February.
Speaking of leaving in February, after far more iterations than you can imagine I finally have a “finished” version of one of the two resumes I’ll be using for my rapidly approaching job hunt. This version places a strong emphasis on game development; I’ll use the other apply to more general high-tech jobs both in the US and Japan. Not that a resume is particularly interesting, I just thought I’d mention it π I replaced the old version with the updated one here. Tips and pointers are always appreciated.
Some time ago I mentioned that I’d made a decision to start hanging out with more friends who can’t speak English. After this Thursday’s class, I for the first time made good on that self-promise. Not that I haven’t wanted to before, it’s just that usually by the time I’ve looked up the hundred or so words I need to read an assigned newspaper article or write an essay on this country’s educational system the Japanese part of my brain tends to fizzle out. I therefore either just sleep, or go hang out with other English-speakers. But not this week!
After Thursday’s class ended, two of my new Korean buddies from the Rits International House, Chie and Min-Kyeong, said they felt like going out for a bite to eat and asked if I wanted to come along. “But of course! Where are we headed?” “Just take us somewhere good!”
So we gathered up a small posse and I led the way to a restaurant downtown called “bikkuri donkee.” That’s “The Surprised Donkey” in English. It’s a wacky family-style restaurant similar in dοΏ½cor to Disneyland, offering a wide variety of “hamburger steak,” something like meatloaf in the US but with a distinctly Japanese flavor.
When we finished dinner the bulk of the posse decided to head home, but Chie and Min-Kyeong made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. “We don’t wanna go home yet. Let’s go get some drinks!” So the remaining group, consisting of myself, Mike, Chie, Min-Kyeong, Min-Jyong, and one other Korean dude whose name I can’t remember, headed off.
I took them all back to my favorite spot for drinks, A-Bar. Because it was quite early and a Thursday night, the place was completely empty – but we still had a good time just chatting and sipping beers together. After a couple of hours had passed we looked at our clocks…we’d started so early that it was barely 11:00pm! It simply wouldn’t do to head back this early! So Min-Kyeong suggested that we continue the night in a Karaoke booth. Karaoke is really not my thing, but I was having a great time hanging out with everyone so I figured why not.
One hour (and quite a bit of embarrassment) later, our song time came to an end. Chie had been sick during the previous week and was dozing in and out of consciousness even with the loud music echoing through the room so I felt sure that the night would end there, but lo and behold – the cold evening air and the energy of hopping onto our bikes rejuvenated her, and she joined right back up with the recurring theme of the evening: “Let’s all hang out longer!”
Only by this time we were running out of ideas of what to do; it definitely wouldn’t be worth going to a club on a Thursday, especially because everyone had homework due the next morning (oops). So I invited them all back to my apartment where we continued sipping beers and talking about nothing in particular.
By this time my head was ready to explode from all of the effort required to function entirely in Japanese for over seven hours straight, not to mention the fact that I was starting to get a little buzzed. I did have some breaks every now and then while chatting with Mike, but all in all it was definitely a push over my previous envelope. The evening finally came to a close when they headed back to their dorm at 2:00am. I fell asleep at 3:00 and woke up at 7:00 to write an essay that was due at 10:40 that day.**
That is a nice resume! I think the biggest suggestion I have is that you list the year for your MCSE, instead of the age you got it (or you could list your age alongside, if you want to impress them with how young you were when you got it). This is because you don’t want the hiring manager to have to stop reading about how great you are to figure out what year that must have been.
Other things, which are totally up to you:
Put Education beneath Technical Skills. All those sections in between are what will interest the employers. They are all going to require a degree anyway, so putting that information first will make them think you don’t have much experience…when that is totally not the case.
Under the “Independent Consultant” section, there’s too much space between the company name and the explanation of what the company is. I thought for a moment that there were two columns of companies you’d worked for.
Some of the bullets look kind of weird. I’m seeing two dots for all of them except “Awards and Memberships”. What kind of encoding is that?
Under “Career Objective”, you use variations of the word “develop” twice. Maybe change the second one to “production”?
I recognize that you probably don’t want to list your contact information on a public website, but you should at least have your name and a “Contact” link at the very top of the resume.
On screen, it’s easier to read sans-serif fonts. Have you considered using Arial or Verdana?
And one last thing…the general layout is good, but I think maybe it would be better if the breaks between sections were more obvious. Perhaps a (colored?) line running along above the name of each section?
…and that’s about it from me. (Well, you asked!)
In other news, it’s really cool that you got to hang out and speak only Japanese for so long. I need some of that kind of immersion myself…
Thanks for the shout out :)!!!!!
The resume looks good. My suggestions would be to add contact info (even if it is just email for the web version) and clearly deliniate the different sections–they all seem to blend together.
Sounds like you had a great time speaking only Japanese with your friends. When I started speaking to my friends in Itlian instead of English (and Spanish instead of English), I learen about 1003402432042034 times faster than I did when just doing book / school work.
Andy
Wow, thanks for all of the great feedback Heather!
Actually, as far as fonts and spacing goes, it was hell trying to get them to look in HTML like they did in the Word document – so the “on paper” version is spaced a bit more effectively than on here (and has my contact information as well).
This version was more of a first go for content/flow/presentation – once I actually pass around a website to employers, I’m definately going to make a separate site that has no links back to my “blog” where I talk of things like waking up drunk in Osaka after a night of partying π
Anyways, what I thought was the final version has, in fact, been corrected once again by not only you all but by my “Mr. I Correct Resumes For A Living” professional…so it looks like another version may yet be on the way!
Incidentally, the first correction he made was to re-do the bullets as you suggested π
Sorry I don’t have a comment about your resume. It looks nice to me, but who am I to comment on anything about the adult world? As for the rest of your post, I have to say, I wish I had been there to see you make your return to the karaoke ring. Hell, I just wish I had been at karaoke at all. I’ll be up in D.C. in about a month and we’re going to do all-night Japanese (Korean) karaoke if I have anything to say about it.
And don’t forget to let your brain rest in English after all that Japanese, especially before you write anything important like a resume!
Yeah dude you would’ve been so proud of me! I actually committed an afternoon and learned M.Flo’s Miss You, EVERYONE’s parts! …Except somehow it sounded way better in my room without a mic than it did blasting out loud (while I’m partially buzzed) π
P.S. Please don’t ever use those two words together again. You know the ones I mean. The “A-World,” so to speak. Eeeeeewwwwwww!
ごめんね、その日疲れていたんだよね。実はあたしも無理したんですけど＾＾ でも、おもしろかったんだよね～！（笑） じゃ～また、来ます~！英語読みにくい （＞。＜）
Glad to help π
As for the issues switching from Word to HTML, I’ve had the same problem (in reverse), trying to get my Yahoo! HotJobs resume to look right in Word. All I can say is GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. ;>
I’ll be interested to see what revisions the professional suggested.
Heather: Man, there have been so many changes & recommendations I can barely remember them all…every little thing from general order/flow to how the lists are formatted to what should be bolded to what types of words to use and avoid to what should be more prominent than what…I’ve quite literally gone through 20 or more versions already (and it looks like there are going to be a number of changes to this posted version too!). It seems a bit overkill at times, but looking back at the original the difference is pretty astonishing.
Chie: 凄～い！やっぱちょっと英語が分かるって知ってたけど、こんなもんが読めるほどうまいって思わへんかった。今からできないふりしたら信じへんね π