{"id":1641,"date":"2014-04-14T07:59:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T14:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2014-04-14T07:59:46","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T14:59:46","slug":"track-your-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/track-your-education","title":{"rendered":"Track your education!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was working with a person recently who was updating his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 for an upcoming job change.\u00a0 As it turns out, he&#8217;s very much a self-taught learner, preferring hands-on experiences to classroom settings.\u00a0 Despite never completing a university degree, he&#8217;s had a successful IT career for over 35 years.<\/p>\n<p>When you look at the &#8220;education&#8221; section of his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, though, you see very little:\u00a0 Some years in university, and that&#8217;s about it.\u00a0 The problem is that he hasn&#8217;t been tracking all this great investment he&#8217;s been making in professional improvement.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The whole point of that &#8220;education&#8221; section is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>To provide evidence that have the minimum requirements to be in the job or field<\/li>\n<li>To demonstrate that you&#8217;ve kept up with important changes, especially in technology-related aspects<\/li>\n<li>To give the impression that you&#8217;re able to learn quickly<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what do you do when your educational background is looking weak or dated?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Track not only your formal schooling, but also individual classes that you&#8217;ve taken over the years.\u00a0 This may be tough to do the first time, but if you update the list on a yearly basis (like when you&#8217;re having a performance evaluation), it won&#8217;t be hard to maintain.<\/li>\n<li>Add to that any certifications you&#8217;ve achieved in processes, methods and technologies.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;ve learned important things on certain projects or assignments, describe how that&#8217;s happened.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My client has a wide range of technologies that he&#8217;s learned over the years, as it&#8217;s been central to his success.\u00a0 So his challenge was to create a statement saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m a self-motivated learner, quickly picking up new processes and technologies when relevant to the job.\u00a0 In many case I&#8217;ve created them as well, as an improvement for the organization.&#8221;\u00a0 It&#8217;s absolutely true, and an important part of why someone would hire him.<\/p>\n<p>Since he&#8217;s in a technology related field, it was important to support this by listing his relevant technical proficiencies, starting first with the ones which are most relevant in today&#8217;s market.\u00a0 Others are listed basically in reverse chronological order.\u00a0 At his age, it was important to drop off (or group together) programming languages and standards which would give the impression that he&#8217;s old and stuck in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Ideally, as you get older the potential content for your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 or CV will be much longer than you&#8217;ll ever use for any single job application.\u00a0 It&#8217;s great comfort to be able to pick just the most compelling information, and gloss over other areas which don&#8217;t reinforce the message you&#8217;re trying to send.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was working with a person recently who was updating his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 for an upcoming job change.\u00a0 As it turns out, he&#8217;s very much a self-taught learner, preferring hands-on experiences <a href=\"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/track-your-education\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,42],"tags":[15,29,37,51],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-carl","4":"has-more-link","5":"post-1641","7":"format-standard","8":"category-career","9":"category-newsletter","10":"post_tag-career-coaching","11":"post_tag-job-hunt","12":"post_tag-learning","13":"post_tag-resume"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1642,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}