Mycareercoach.com

CV tips for:
IT technicians and
consultants

In an ideal world your CV needs to communicate the fact that you can add value to the business and suggest that you have business insight as well as technical acumen.

Lengthy technical jargon, whilst having some meaning for you, may have no meaning to a HR decision maker. And your particular areas of technical expertise may not even be familiar to a director of IT or CIO whose focus may be broader.

Mention your most important skills at the beginning of your CV, and put details of your most valuable/significant skills in your profile (technical and non technical).

Avoid using detailed technical jargon unless you are including a list of specific capabilities you may have (see last bullet point) and avoid giving 'chapter and verse'.

If you can show how activities or projects you were involved in had positive effects at a business level you will be far more attractive than a nuts and bolts techie. For example:

'Part of a three person team who completed company-wide desktop refresh (400 users) of abc to def over a two week period.'
(Emphasise projects completed on time and on budget.)

'Fixed shared network print server problem in the accounts department over the weekend! This was critical for accounts to issue the invoices.'

'Recovered CRM database. This held all the sales department’s data (45 salespeople) and 10,000 customer records.'

'A virus had corrupted several files, so the system was unusable. Fixed the problem inside an hour. The sales director was ecstatic and gave me a letter of commendation.'

'Put in place real-time data replication facility (data mirroring), so that information across all business was backed up off-site and could be made available in the event of a disaster.'

'Identified an opportunity to cut cost by adding work onto an existing contract and eliminating another supplier, which created a simpler support environment, and saved the business $320k over two years.'

Consider putting any lists of technical skills or training courses and accreditations at the end of your CV. Avoid listing them in single columns; put them in tables and mention the most important.

Decide whether you wish to include all your skills: you could categorise some, for example: 'expert user of all Office/desktop software applications', instead of separately listing applications such as Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint and Outlook.