CV RFC

[denny]

Comments on new CV welcomed: http://new.metamathics.org/personal/denny/cv.doc

Edit: updated with many of the suggestions from comments so far - thank you.
Edit: and again, with a second batch of updates. Thank you!

Comments

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Apart from the presumably accidental page break (unless that's an openoffice glitch), the thing that jumps out is the lack of some kind of "Key Skills" section. People recruiting need to be able to see at a glance whether you have most of the boxes ticked, and if they can't they might not even bother to get as far as the details.

I'll have a better look over the weekend and give more detailed feedback.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I forgot the key skills bit in my comment below, but yes, definitely useful when scanning interviewees CVs.

I'm not going to say my CV is perfect, but if you want to take a glance, I can email/IM it to you, Denny?

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

A Word Doc? :-p [joking]

"...of working alone and in small teams..."

To me the word 'alone' being first makes it seem that you are more of a loner. How about: "...of working both in small teams and independently..."?

"...project management[,] and personnel management duties." - I think there should be a comma as indicated, but you usually were better at grammar than me, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong.

familiar with Linux, Apache[,] and MySQL setup and administration. - as above...

FYI "In the period from July 2003 to August 2004 I was unable to work due to a serious motorcycle accident." is appearing on a completely separate page to the "August 2004 — June 2006" and "March 2002 — October 2003" bits - I'm guessing this wasn't intentional, perhaps a bug in the output from your wordprocessor?

Overall I think it looks good. Good luck! :-)

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

"I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong"

Oops - I think I made a grammar mistake in my grammar correction - Doh! That should be "I wouldn't be surprised if I were wrong", shouldn't it?

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

That entirely depends on whether you want to be subjunctive.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

The comma after the penultimate item of a list, known as the Oxford comma, has been being argued about by grammarians for quite some time. I use it, the MLA(Modern Language Association) don't specify one way or another, and the Economist Style Guide recommends against it except in cases where it disambiguates.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Interesting - I wasn't aware that it was disputed within linguistic circles...

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Ah, independently is a good word - thanks. You're not the first to pick up on that, but you are the first to offer a viable alternative wording :)

The comma is there in American English and not in British English, iirc.

There seems to be a disagreement between Abiword and OpenOffice (etc) on what constitutes a page. I'll reformat it in OOo as that seems closer to Word's expectations.

[dmh.livejournal.com]

Looks good to me, though I don't look at CVs for a living or anything. There are a few obvious speeling errors (collaborative, large-scale). Also I don't see any contact address/phone number/email address.

(On my own CV I also list marital status/nationality/diving licence: Full, clean".)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

This is the version for agencies - they rip the contact details out (for obvious reasons), so it's best to provide them with one already formatted with that in mind (otherwise they're likely to mess it up).

I used to have the driving license line in there until I got six points on my license *looks innocent* They're expired now, so I'll add it back in - thanks for the reminder :)

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

I agree about the offputting wording of "eight years commercial experience of working alone". You also don't mention any kind of future direction - I realise you're flexible about your future, but this is a useful sign for a company. Rands talked quite recently and usefully about working out a "mission statement" for yourself that's meaningful rather than boilerplate.

More pedantically: "open source" should be hyphenised when used as an adjective. "Project management and personnel management duties" should have hyphens too, but I think it's more elegant to just drop the word "duties".

A couple more comments that I think are just stylistic: I prefer gerunds (-ing) to -ment or -ship, and I think "but would be interested" would be more positive as "and would be interested".

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Suggestions largely implemented - ta :)

More comments (can you tell I'm bored at work)

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

• Overall, it looks very very plain. Whilst that's infinitely preferable to being too fussy, it could look a bit sleeker.


• I'd put the website addresses on the same line as the company name, rather than in the text.


• Get rid of the "Curriculum Vitae" heading - it's obvious what it is


• You're just above two pages at the moment, so fiddle with the layout until it's just under


• Mention the first class degree in the summary


• The final sentence of the 2nd paragraph has repetition and the 'reasonable; is unnecessary. Suggest - The vast majority of these have been Linux/Apache/Perl/MySQL systems and I am therefore familiar with their setup and administration.


• Where the second part of each job description is prefaced with "Technologies:", the first half should probably have "Responsibilities:". This would require changing "Responsible for" to "Managing" in the OG paragraph, but that sounds better anyway.


• "company's" in the first sentence of OG, "various" in the first sentence of Foresite, are superfluous, redundant, and unnecessary.


• What does "Maintaining a large system which enabled and managed a proactive maintenance service" mean?

Re: More comments (can you tell I'm bored at work)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Mostly it means 'I hated this job' ;)

Actually it means 'this company did something incredibly tedious'. We had crappy little servers in every branch of Tesco which would report back to our central server ever 5 minutes or so. These servers had hundreds of inputs from all of the fridges, freezers, aircon, etc in the store. When one of the signals from (e.g.) a fridge drifted out of a certain range too often in a certain time period, our system would highlight this to one of our call-centre staff. They would then call the store in question and say "Take all the food out of fridge number A4-F, it's about to break down. We've dispatched an engineer to look at it for you, he should be there in 90 minutes." or similar.

Saved Tesco itro 7 million pounds a year while I was working there, but there's nothing exciting to be said about it beyond that.

Re: More comments (can you tell I'm bored at work)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Overall, it looks very very plain. Whilst that's infinitely preferable to being too fussy, it could look a bit sleeker.

My one-before-last CV had little grey boxes around each section. I can't figure out how to do them in this word processor, but would that be the kind of thing?

You're just above two pages at the moment, so fiddle with the layout until it's just under

It's under on my system. *pouts*

I'll drop the font size a notch I guess.

The vast majority of these have been Linux/Apache/Perl/MySQL systems and I am therefore familiar with their setup and administration.

There are pedantic fine-point reasons why this wouldn't be an accurate re-wording of the sentence. I've poked it in a different way though.


Website addresses moved, degree mentioned in summary, CV heading kept because I like it :-p

Ta. xx

[goth-amalthea.livejournal.com]

I think it looks to plain, it could do with a slight jazzing up. Nothing fancy, just a sleeker layout that simply lots of individual paragraphs. I also think the introductory paragraph is a bit too long. You don't need to repeat yourself - maybe put it as bullet points of previous examples of work (maybe merge this with your key skills section)? You don't need to have your name under personal details as you already have it as a title, I wouldn't bother writing CV either as it's obvious. Personal details I would change to contact details and have your email and phone in there.

[goth-amalthea.livejournal.com]

I would also put the dates as the headers for each job so it is easy for the reader to see the progression

[goth-amalthea.livejournal.com]

and change Jan 2008 to present

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I just got laid off, so it's accurate as is :)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Contact details are left out of this version because it's the one agencies forward on to their clients (and they don't want the client to then deal with me direct and not pay the agency their fee, hence no contact details).

If I call it contact details, I can't see any good place to mention the driving license, nationality, and date of birth (this latter being vaguely important because my age isn't obvious from the dates I went to uni - I'll tend to be put forward for slightly more junior roles unless I make it clear that I'm ancient).

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

FYI the page layout looks fine now in Word...

I think it's pretty much there now. Of course there are still options to stylise it further, but I think the content is good.

[bioguyver.livejournal.com]

I haven't had time to read all of your CV or all the comments here, so my apologies if this has been discussed already.

One of the things that stood out for me was the statement about having your bike accident and not being able to work. To me this is not a good thing to draw attention to. If an employer was looking between 2 candidates that might be a deal breaker as they might consider you to be a problem in the future if you have to have any time off related to the accident. Obviously at Interview you can explain what went on and that it is not affecting your work but it might stop an employer from considering it.

That's just my opinion on it and I could well be wrong in my thinking. My suggestion if you want to have something to cover those dates would be to consider something that is maybe a slight bending of the truth but still something you can bank on or indeed make the gap not jump out. Maybe list yourself as freelance for that period?

The only other thing I saw was that you mention managing a small team. do you need to say small? only reason I mention it is that it might come across as you only want to be involved in small teams and not like a bigger team to manage. Of course you might not want to manage a larger team, so I would leave it as it is.

Hope this makes sense.

Ja