Presenting Your Technical Skills
The primary objective of a resume is to interest a potential employer in the skills and accomplishments that you have acquired and to distinguish these assets relative to any other resume that has been received by the company. For the employer, the resume should answer the questions:
- What can you do?
- How have you demonstrated this?
In essence, the Technical Skills section of the resume details your knowledge base - the generic skills that you bring to any job. These can include technical proficiency with analytical instrumentation, the ability to conduct multi-step synthesis campaigns, management skills (people, projects, budgets, etc.), programming languages, computer programs, and other job-specific talents.
The skill set should be presented as succinctly as possible. Remember, you want the potential employer to find your background interesting enough to call you for additional details. It is not necessary to provide multi-page descriptions of your skills.
An example of the Technical Section of your resume is
CAPABILITIES
- Conduct multi-step synthesis of complex natural products
- Use molecular mechanics and dynamics to study biomolecular systems
- Develop computer software for chemical applications
- Programming languages including FORTRAN, C, Pascal, perl, javascript, assembler
- In depth experience with computational chemistry programs including SYBYL, MacroModel, Insight/Discover, Quanta/CHARMm, Cerius2, Biograf, Chem-X, AMBER
- Production experience with chemical information systems including Daylight, ISIS, Oracle
- Extensive use of HTML, CGI programming, javascript for the development of commercial Web sites.
Example 1
Technical Skills
Abilities are not limited to technical strengths. This section of the resume also can contain examples of management skills.
TECHNICAL SKILLS
- Conduct multi-step synthesis of complex natural products
- Use molecular mechanics and dynamics to study biomolecular systems
- Develop computer software for chemical applications
- Programming languages including FORTRAN, C, Pascal, perl, javascript, assembler
- In depth experience with computational chemistry programs including SYBYL, MacroModel, Insight/Discover, Quanta/CHARMm, Cerius2, Biograf, Chem-X, AMBER
- Production experience with chemical information systems including Daylight, ISIS, Oracle
- Extensive use of HTML, CGI programming, javascript for the development of commercial Web sites.
MANAGEMENT SKILLS
- Coordinate research and development activities within computational group
- Defined technical directions, staffed a group of 15 professionals and consultants.
- Supervised the performance of employees, established new areas of scientific computing for the Research Department.
- Proposed and managed an annual budget of $4.0 million.
- Specified, developed and managed the growth of molecular modeling hardware and software architectures.
- Designed, proposed for management approval and implemented a multimillion dollar scientific computing environment comprised of centralized mainframes, networks and distributed workstations which utilized the latest advances in client/server based software systems.
- Established the computational chemistry group and integrated it as a part of the research process.
- Defined research objectives for therapeutic project areas in conjunction with other groups.
Example 2
Technical Skills
Many of the people we talk with who are completing their undergraduate or graduate degrees do not feel that they have any "marketable skills" to include on their resume. While most people think only of skills obtained "on-the-job," these skills also can be learned as a part of project, as officers in fraternities/sororities, etc. This approach to resume preparation will be the subject of a future seminar.
