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I have over 13 years of experience with 5+ companies and their corresponding+side projects. Despite trying my best I am not being able to squeeze my CV and so far it is still 4 pages lengthy. My resume contains the following sections:

  • Intro Box with name and URls etc.
  • Summary
  • Technical Skills (5-6 sections in bullets)
  • Other Skills
  • Experience (3-4 Entries)
    • Title
    • Company Name, Tenure.
    • Projects Details in Bullets
  • Side Projects
  • Education
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    We don't do resume reviews here, consider posting for personalised advice in The Workplace Chat (though best done during the week). There's really no way to answer this that doesn't amount to "condense it down to what sells your profile" and that's basically resume-writing 101. Also note that you're allowed 2 pages with that kind of experience. :)
    – Lilienthal
    Jun 20, 2020 at 11:50
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    @Lilienthal this isn't asking for a resume review, is it?
    – HorusKol
    Jun 20, 2020 at 12:37
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    I am not asking to review my cv.
    – Volatil3
    Jun 20, 2020 at 12:59
  • 3 or 4 pages for 13 years is fine. Why do you want to shorten it that much? 1 page is for a junior employee.
    – BrtH
    Jun 20, 2020 at 16:14
  • @HorusKol Well no, but it's the only way this is realistically answerable. Your answer is a good attempt and has great advice but it's also trying to guess at the OP's resume and providing answers from there. If we want a generic "What should my resume contain?" question that may be an idea but I'd launch a dedicated question for it. If we don't go into the OP's resume in detail the core question here only has a rather trivial answer: "make it shorter". Presumably OP has tried that already which is why he's looking for advice. :)
    – Lilienthal
    Jun 21, 2020 at 18:43

2 Answers 2

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Put yourself in the shoes of the person reviewing the resume. No matter how long your resume is, they're probably not going to spend more than a few minutes reviewing it-- they're just trying to figure out if it is worth scheduling a phone screen with you. Most likely, that means that they're going to look at a few bits of information and skip the rest. Your goal is to ensure that the bits of information that are most likely to get you moved on to the next round are easy to find and hard to skip.

I've never seen a Summary section on a resume that I was reviewing that made me want to interview the person so I'd strongly consider eliminating that. They're almost always very generic and rather uninformative platitudes.

Similarly, I've never seen a list of skills that made me want to interview the person. I'd expect most of the useful skills to be spelled out in the section on experience. Those lists may be useful if you're trying to get through automated systems and searches and want to include acronyms that you don't want to include in your experience section like older or newer names for technologies. If you're just trying to get through an automated tool, though, a simple list is enough; you don't need separate bullet points.

In the experience section, realize that it's going to be pretty rare that anyone cares much what you were doing 8 or 10 years ago. Technology moves fast enough that if you haven't been doing it in the past few years, you've likely forgotten a lot and the technology has moved on a lot so that experience isn't particularly relevant. Over time, that means that you generally want to go through and cut down how much information you list about prior positions particularly when it is no longer relevant to your current goals. At some point, you probably want to start eliminating positions entirely or at least eliminating the description. If you started 15 years ago as a Help Desk Analyst I but have been a developer for the past 10 years, you probably want to remove the help desk role entirely or at least eliminate the detail about what you were responsible for.

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Two pages (one piece of paper) should be more than enough for anyone, regardless of experience. Mostly because what you did 10+ years ago lis much less relevant than what you did 2 years ago. On the other hand, 4 pages is nowhere near the record I've received from applicants - though, you probably could and should still trim it.

Intro Box with name and URls etc.

URIs? Get rid of anything other than GitHub and blog if you have one. Chances are they won't even check GitHub. They might check your blog's homepage, but unless you've done outstanding post on there they won't go past the index.

Make sure to include email and phone number, too.

Summary

Your resume should be a summary in itself. You are also usually allowed a cover letter - and you can put some of this in there instead.

Technical Skills (5-6 sections in bullets)

If you really need this, put it after your experience. Your experience section should demonstrate what skills you've applied in your roles, anyway.

Other Skills

Again, show me your skills in your experience. Don't list MS Word as a skill. I can see you can use it well enough to write a resume and cover letter.

Experience (3-4 Entries) Title Company Name, Tenure. Projects Details in Bullets

Keep it relevant to the job you're doing. Unless you did something really awesome, like working on the original Facebook launch, any project more than 5 years old isn't really relevant. Also, if you did the same kind of project for multiple clients, just say "built x type app/site/apllication for multiple clients". Chances are no-one will have heard of the clients, so about studying with names (also NDA and confidentiality clauses may apply).

My first job (of four) ran 2000-2006, and I can fit on one line what is relevant to future employers: "built time sheet, support ticketing, and online knowledge base systems in PHP/MySQL, using HTML, JavaScript and CSS". I also worked in electrical panels, on embedded systems, and did some .NET - but haven't in 14 years, and it's not relevant to the work I would seek now.

My most recent position has a bit more detail, but still only needs a few lines to cover modern programming techniques and patterns, team leading, and project management, and how they were applied/utilised.

Side Projects

Nice to see, but are they relevant to the position your working on? Do they add anything more than your actual job experience? Were they commercially successful or popular open source projects?

Education

With 10+ years experience all you really have to put here is your highest level degree or diploma title, with the institution and date of award. Your most recent work experience is of greater value. However, if you have current and relevant certificates, include them.

Last thing: avoid too much decoration (unless you're a designer going for a design role) - simple title, subtitle, and body formatting is enough.

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