November DataDNA Challenge- Resume/CV Tips
Are you considering joining the November DataDNA challenge? This is a great opportunity to update your resume and refine your data visualization and design skills. Below is my submission for the challenge. With so much feedback and questions on LinkedIn, I wanted to share 3 design tips and 3 tips for using Astrato to build your resume!
Resume Design
Content
Pick the primary content for your resume. This is likely your work history or project history depending on the stage in your career. This will take up the majority of your resume and be the focal point of your design. Once your primary content is defined, identify the remaining elements that you want to include on your resume. Generally this includes skills, education, certifications.
Visuals
Now that you know what you want to include on your resume, you can plan out how you want to display the information. I recommend keeping the visuals fairly simple and intuitive: gauge charts, Gantt charts, and radar charts work well to display experience, skills, and work history. Adding in complex Sanky and Network Diagrams are distracting for a professional presentation (though they are incredibly valuable and creative assets for your general portfolio!).
White Space
Time to pick your layout! I personally love sketching my designs in a notebook before jumping to the compute design. The sketch doesn't need to be perfect but give you an idea of where you'll be putting visuals once you get to your screen. Here's where white space comes in- don't pack your canvas with text, boxes, images and clutter. White space is your friend and will give your visuals room to breath and speak! If you are finding that you don't have space to give a clean look while also providing the detail, try using actions to hide information until a user interacts with your dashboard (more on this in the next section!).
Final Thought..
Finally, your dashboard resume won't be ATS-compliant (applicant tracking system) or usable for resume uploads. Think of this resume as part of your portfolio. A recruiter will see your text resume (so make sure you always have a word document version up to date), but a hiring team will want to see your portfolio. Why not help them learn about you and your skills through your portfolio!
Astrato Resume
Data
I spent some time thinking through how I wanted users to interact with my resume in order to create the most comprehensive dataset that I could. For example, I decided to intentionally link skills and rolls as either technical or leadership so that you could easily see skills accomplishments, and roles that all went together. The great thing about working with Google Sheets in Astrato is that you can have your worksheet open in one tab and Astrato open in the other. I thought of this connection after I started building, so I added a column to the end of my dataset, went to the data view to bring in the new field and in <2 min had my button filters connected!
Layers
Now is the time to get using the layers toolbar if you haven't already. As you can see, my resume has MANY objects on screen. When working with many objects, I like to undock the layers toolbar and keep it on screen next to the objects that I'm working with. This allows me to easily find, group, hide, and lock objects to create a "pixel perfect" look!
Images & Gifs
It is very simple to add in images and gifs to your resume to create a portfolio section! Remember that images must be on the cloud (no storing data here!). So to host my own images, I signed up for a free cloudinary account. There you can upload your images and gifs and use the individual links on your resume workbook.
I hope you found these tips helpful for creating your own interactive resume! What tips do you have for making your interactive resume?
Comments
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If we hadn’t already hired you, this would have sealed the deal! Interactive resume for the win!
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