It may seem that writing a CV for a junior developer is just a formality, because you will easily find a job in the IT industry anyway. Remember, however, that the competition is much tougher when it comes to the best high-earning companies. Poor application documents can destroy your chances of getting your dream job. Fortunately, writing a professional programmer resume isn’t that difficult.
Show your portfolio
Do you have an account on Github? Do you remember the projects you carried out during your studies? Now it’s time you can finally use them. Every potential employer, like e.g. https://leancode.co/, wants tangible evidence of your skills. Describe what exactly you did, what technologies you used and what you learned from it. It’s a good idea to list these things, especially if you don’t have a commercial experience yet.
Skills and competencies
The absolute most important thing in a CV for a junior developer applicant is listing your skills. The very way of listing competences may indicate what kind of candidate we are dealing with.
If you’re a front-end developer and mention trivial information such as: knowledge of HTML or CSS before competences that are much more difficult to obtain, such as JavaScript programming or knowledge of JS frameworks like AngularJS or ReactJS – it may may be seen as you’re not able to fully assign importance to individual elements of the front-end developer’s work.
Another issue is the number of skills and technologies listed. It is true that the best people in IT are those whose competence cross-section is very large. Interestingly, when we look at their CV, we see surprising modesty when it comes to the mentioned skills.
Show that you develop
Are you training? Did you take part in a course? No matter how you acquired the knowledge – even free trainings, as well as those financed by the university, count. They show that you want to learn. The world of technology is constantly changing and developing. Therefore, it is important to keep up with what is happening in the industry.
Education
Apart from work experience, education is the most important information in the entire Curriculum Vitae. The recently completed school should be at the very top. If the last stage of a CV writer’s education is higher education, it doesn’t make much sense to include the elementary or high school you attended.
If you have the status of a student, it should be marked by writing a note that the studies are still ongoing. Remember to specify in advance your availability for the employer, too.
If you graduated with a very good grade or even honors, be sure to show it off. This is the right place to brag!
Foreign languages
Does a developer need to know foreing languages? The answer is yes. Knowledge of the English language is extremely important. Although there will probably be a few people who can cope with the world of computer science without a good command of the language, if you want to become a good specialist, you must use English at a communicative level. This is due to the fact that the programming language was created in English, and moreover, it is the basic language in the IT industry. Additionally, large concerns often require their employees to contact foreign clients.
