Marketing Your Technical Resume

Dear Geeks (and the non-geeks who love them),

The world loves you because you help them get what they want.  Broken computer? You get their computer to work properly. No internet? You can make the internet come back again. Email down? You bring the email back up. These are skills that are in demand, in as much as people understand how badly they need those skills.

You don't think about aspirin much, do you? Why would you? Well, if you had a headache, you'd think about aspirin a lot (especially if you couldn't find it immediately). And once you took some aspirin and your headache went away, do you spend time thinking about aspirin again? Of course not.

So break it down into problem and solution and you realize no one thinks about the solution (you) until they have a problem.

But unless you happen to have an interview while the boss's computer breaks down and you fix it, what good is that? Well, if you understand how and when people think about technical services, you can better position yourself to make yourself more attractive.

This means that instead of just listing your skill-sets (which I'm sure are legion) and your certifications (no longer optional in many technical fields), you need to make the hiring boss understand why they need the solution you provide. You need them to feel the problem.

How do you do this? Cover letter, mon frere. Can you think about a time in which you fixed something? Great. Tell the story. Don't talk about how you rewired a switch or updated the firmware (no one cares about the solution), but explain how the problem happened and what problems it caused. Did the problem affect the entire company? Were hundreds of people standing around with nothing to do because the office file server went haywire? Think about the loss of productivity (better yet, describe the loss of productivity in dollars lost!) and how you swooped in (you don't need a cape or anything) and fixed it, bringing peace back to Metropolis (okay, there may be too many Superman references here).

That's a cover letter. If you can even bring some of that "Let me show you the problems you will be facing" stuff into your resume before you list the many ways you are a solution, you will cut your job search dramatically.