"Some Familiarity" Skills on Resume and in Portfolio

Question

As a graphic designer, I see several job ads saying, "some familiarity with X is a plus."

I had used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Dreamweaver, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Flash, etc. a while ago. I could probably pick some of those skills back up again pretty easily. Others, probably not very easily.

Some I was never fully knowledgeable in, but had a basic familiarity with. I am OK with including these technologies on my resume for those types of jobs, but should I include those projects in my portfolio?

Would doing so make them think I could just pick it up very easily and they would expect me to use those skills without struggle on day one?

Conversely, does leaving it out of my portfolio make it seem like I could be lying on my resume about having some knowledge of those skills?

Answer 1

Your resume is your marketing department. You advertise what you want to sell. I am pretty sure putting on your resume that you did some basic javascript programming back in the day, where when you click a button the web page background changed. It was a pretty impressive thing to make in 1995 but do you really want to sell that skill. I am a UNIX sysadmin and I have 25+ years experience, during which I touched some UNIX flavors that no one remembers anymore. Yet some unlucky people still run those and in need of sysadmins. If I advertise those skills on my resume, I know I will get some hits from recruiters and probably get hired to support them. But do I really put myself out there as the last defender of the proverbial faith ? My answer is a big N-O ! I want to be able to market my skills which are still in demand and progressing every day. So, if this employer vanishes one day, I will still have a marketable skill for more than a handful of companies over the world.

My 2 cents.

Answer 2

I would say keep it in on job boards, but tweak it for specific jobs you are applying for. I had some obscure technology on my resume that actually got me an interview because so few people even knew about it, much less had ever used it. So never take things OFF of a resume unless you never want to use those technologies again.

When applying for a job that requires, say C#, keeping C or C++ on would be a good idea because people can see the progression. If you're going through a recruiter, ask for specifics about the job and fine tune your resume with the recruiter's input.

Even if some of your skills are dated, some of them are getting harder to find these days. While you may think that DOS and UNIX, or even COBOL may no longer be relevant, there are still legacy systems out there and employers who are dying for people with that old knowledge as more and more of the older IT folks retire.

The one caveat is that everything on your resume is fair game for an interview and they may quiz you on technologies that are not related to the job that you have listed on your resume to see if you are padding or not.

Answer 3

On my resume I have a section which reads a bit like this:

I used this when I was still fresh out of college and didn't have a lot of experience to write about. I would edit it based on the job I was applying for, since a lot of recruiters don't really have any knowledge of the technologies in question, but simply want to see it listed on your resume before passing your information up the chain to the client.

This made it easy for them to identify me as a prospective hire, rather than having to dig through my experience to find the keyword they were looking for.

The point behind listing those technologies as simply being familiar with them (and the way I would discuss it in an interview situation) was that I wouldn't be excluded from the candidate pool as lacking skills they are interested in, however I would be able to explain that while I know what the language/program is about, I haven't used it in a while and would need a period of time to reacquaint myself with that technology.

As far as Javascript is concerned, it's the fastest growing technology in front and back-end development (check out the Stack Overflow 2016 Developer Survey). I highly recommend checking it out and learning how to use the top JS libraries out there (such as Note.JS, or AngularJS). You can land great paying jobs simply by knowing HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript and thus being able to build great templates - if you're interested in this, of course.

Good Luck!