Hi, I've spent my career looking at thousands of resumes so I hope you'll take my opinion seriously on this.
I appreciate the idea of trying to break out of the fold. People will use new fonts, new structure, diagrams, etc. I understand why people do it, and why they think it's a good idea. That said, it's not a good idea. As the guy looking at resumes, I just want to know what you're doing, what you've done and what education you have in as little time as possible.
A few specific points:
- Your latest project is waaay down at the bottom. It should be at the top. What you've done most recently is the most relevant, right? Put it right in my face.
- The first two sections are vaguely written in the third person which IMO doesn't help me figure out anything about you.
- I can't figure out if you have any formal higher education. If not, that's cool, but because the resume is in a strange format, I can't tell either way.
People don't read resumes like they read a book, they scan them, then might drill into some details. Changing the standard structure is like when Facebook changed to the Timeline.
To be honest, I've grown so tired of resumes in general that I just go to people's LinkedIn. It has standard formatting that is easy to scan and figure out what they've done and what they're currently doing.
You bring up education a few times. Given the length of his work history, is it even important at this point? Why are you so interested in it?
I ask because a lot of people claim that education only really matters for your first job. After that you let your experience speak for itself. So I'm interested in hearing you perspective.
> You bring up education a few times. Given the length of his work history, is it even important at this point? Why are you so interested in it?
Education is (we hope) the rigorous, dedicated, examined and measured study of some subject. On Peter's resume, he mentions that he is an expert Perl programmer. I have no way to measure this without giving him a coding question. However, if he had he has a such-and-such GPA in the CS program at Stanford, then I have some way of measuring his expertise in the curriculum there (BTW - I go so far as to review curricula of various programs when it comes time of the year to do college grad interviews)
I fully admit that not all people need degrees. It's like saying that everyone in the factory must have a mechanical engineering degree. They don't need it... but if they do, I'd like to know quickly.
It also is not saying that someone cannot learn these things on their own. It's also not saying that someone without that study can be smarter and more capable than someone with those years of study. Both happen, a lot. And also a lot of dropouts I've known are more capable than their graduating counterparts. [OT: all of this is why I've been advocating apprenticeships out of high school for some time now, especially in games, which I used to work on.]
Back to the original question, going to the extreme end of the spectrum, would you take a Ph.D. seriously on someone's resume, or not? I do. Even years later, it means they dedicated years of time to the study of that subject.
I agree with your analysis, in principle. However, my formal university education is twenty years ago, and much less relevant to the self-educated Perl programming that I've been doing since. And this format allows me to highlight this relative relevance, so I just mentioned "Business Administration" in the resume icon. I'm hoping people can assess my coding skills by looking at the source code of my open-source projects.
I appreciate the idea of trying to break out of the fold. People will use new fonts, new structure, diagrams, etc. I understand why people do it, and why they think it's a good idea. That said, it's not a good idea. As the guy looking at resumes, I just want to know what you're doing, what you've done and what education you have in as little time as possible.
A few specific points:
- Your latest project is waaay down at the bottom. It should be at the top. What you've done most recently is the most relevant, right? Put it right in my face.
- The first two sections are vaguely written in the third person which IMO doesn't help me figure out anything about you.
- I can't figure out if you have any formal higher education. If not, that's cool, but because the resume is in a strange format, I can't tell either way.
People don't read resumes like they read a book, they scan them, then might drill into some details. Changing the standard structure is like when Facebook changed to the Timeline.
To be honest, I've grown so tired of resumes in general that I just go to people's LinkedIn. It has standard formatting that is easy to scan and figure out what they've done and what they're currently doing.
Hope that helps.