Women of Color in Tech

CHAPTER 7Demonstrating Your Skills

In this chapter, we will go over the many ways you can document your experience, ranging from traditional means like resume, online platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub, and other more creative means, like writing, public speaking, or building your own website.

Building Your Resume(s)

Although there are many ways that you can show off your skills and experience, the resume is still relevant, important, and necessary. A resume serves as your “calling card.” Resume help employers understand your skills and your educational and employment background, and help determine if your unique mix of attributes could be a potential fit for a job or career with their organization.

You'll notice the heading for this section has resumes as potentially plural. You may find that one resume is appropriate to applying to only certain types of jobs; the skills and experiences you demonstrate for a user-experience design job may not be the skills and experiences you want to highlight for a cybersecurity job, for example. Depending on the types of roles you are applying for, you may need more than one resume so that it is tailored to the position you're applying to.

There are many, many formats that a resume can take. Let's go over the three most common types: chronological, functional, and combination.

Chronological

A chronological resume (Figure 7.1), perhaps the most commonly used resume format, lists your work experiences in the order in which they occurred, ...