Careers in the Technology Industry

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Job Descriptions

Writing a good job description is hard. That's true even when the job has been clearly defined let alone when there's some ambiguity. My experience has been that there are a lot of gaping holes in what HR or even a hiring manager provide for job descriptions when looking for a new hire.

Some suggest that, as an interviewee, you should use the interview to get clarification, but often you're more worried about just answering the interview questions. A job should be clearly defined before a posting for it is sent to recruiters and to HR. Otherwise, they'll just waste their time screening people that aren't good fits.

To that end, I'm posting a collection of IT job descriptions that I've encountered over the years. Although in bullet form, I believe these descriptions work fairly well as a checklist for typical situations. They're several years old, but they still describe the qualities of a good hire. Each job role is described at three levels: junior, intermediate, and senior.

Sample Resumes

Learning how to write a resume isn't easy. There's more to it than just listing your work history. A good resume is one that remains factually accurate, but also demonstrates your understanding of the work you did and the impact it had on the bigger picture.

For example, if you're a web developer that modified an existing application, your resume can be improved by explaining the purpose of the modification. If you're in the business of analyzing business processes, you want to make sure that you describe the impact your analysis had and not just describe the analysis you did.

For my own learning, I hold on to resumes that people send me. They're all free, so why not? Each resume has the potential to show me something that I should, and equally important, something I shouldn't do. And because these are real resumes rather than samples that someone made up, I find them more valuable.

I've posted some of these resumes on this site. I tried to be faithful to the original formatting, but these resumes often came to me in text format so I had to make some educated guesses sometimes.