Episode 116: Building the social media resume – “Computer skills” are obsolete and the 7 things that can replace it.
Posted by: admin in Job Search / Interviewing, Social Networking / New Media
Do you have “computer skills” listed on your resume? Get rid of it, it’s obsolete! I explain in this week’s podcast, or the blog post below.
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
Over the weekend, I met with a person I’m mentoring. She went to the same college as I did, found me through our alumni network, and wanted to talk about her next job and look over her resume.
One of the things that I saw on there that was interesting, was a section called “Computer Skills.”
I went through each of the items and called her on it:
- Adobe Bridge Software?
What is that? Is it important? No. Take it off.
- iMac basic programming?
You mean, you used an iMac computer and did some things? She nodded hesitantly. I asked her, do you REALLY know how to program? She shook her head no. Gone.
- Datanet and Filemaker?
OK, so you used these programs to maintain some files. But are you an expert at it and did you really use them all the time? Not really.
- Google Apps
I don’t mind that it’s on there, but she already used it earlier in the resume, so that one gets removed as well.
- Lastly, Microsoft Office
You graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science degree. You live in New York City. You speak French and Italian. You’ve managed to send me your resume converted into a PDF. Proving you know Office is pretty much understood.
So that got me to wondering.
For anyone that graduated with a Bachelors degree from the year 2000 and beyond, is the “computer skills” section of your resume completely obsolete?
And if the answer is yes, what goes in its place?
To answer that, we have to go old school for a minute. This is when having myself as your Generation X host comes in handy.
Need I remind you, I graduated in 1991, when there were NO cell phones, NO internet, NO email, and Photoshop 2.0 had just been released. For those keeping score, the concept of Photoshop layers wouldn’t be invented for 5 more years, and they’re basically up to version 12 now.
In my junior year Microsoft Windows 3.0 had just been released, along with Office version 1.0.
Social media? Ha! Mark Zuckerberg was 7.
So as someone that legitimately graduated with a degree in Computer Information Systems, putting a “Computer Skills” section on your resume really meant something.
When I started doing most of the hiring for the multimedia startup I worked for in 1994, it was a real challenge to determine which people had true computer skills, and which had played a few hundred games of Solitaire on their computer and claimed they knew Windows.
Thus, I came up with a computer test that I gave during interviews to see how people shaped up. It became legendary around the office, as no candidate had ever received a perfect score.
What’s interesting is back then, typing speed was a huge differentiator. You could sit in the conference room with someone in their brand new suit and listen to them smoothly talk about their tech skills, but when you sat them down in front of a keyboard and asked them to drill down into a subdirectory and alt-tab to another open application, you knew right away.
Dug into the archives and actually found my resume from 12 years ago:
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Do you set goals at the end of every year? Not cliched, forgettable “I need to lose 5 pounds” goals. But real, tangible, goals? Do you write them down? And do they matter? Let’s find out.
