I'm applying for jobs as a software engineer, and my resume has a list of skills like "Java", "React", and "Python" that I'm trying to attach skill levels to. I have extensive experience in many of these skills, and I'm weighing different ways of indicating skill level on the resume. Here are a few traditional options, and my issues with them:
- Years of Experience - How often was the skill used? Do I include years I didn't use it? Doesn't correlate well with actual skill, as someone with two years working Java-only is likely more skilled than someone with 20 years of occasional use. Also, the Holy Bible Cracking the Coding Interview specifically says to avoid using years of experience
- 1-5 - Totally arbitrary. How does your 5 compare with someone else's 5? No standardization possible
- Proficient / Advanced / Expert - Intuitive, but I'm a really solid engineer, and it can't look good to write "expert" next to half of your skills. It's clear, but not particularly demonstrative
Here are a few more creative ideas I'm weighing:
- Percentile - Fairly blunt to say "in this skill I'm better than 95% of engineers", possibly too blunt. Also not very intuitive, and having to explain your units on a resume may not be ideal when the average resume gets 10 seconds of view time
- Hours - This could be really useful actually, a guesstimate on how many hours you've spent working with the technology. Completely standardized, utterly intuitive, but definitely unusual
Is there a clear best choice here? Is there a better choice than any I've listed?