Writing a resume for a data science role
I have spent a great deal of time reviewing resumes from my friends, coworkers, classmates, and family members — not to mention strangers! I just love reviewing resumes.
After reviewing dozens of resumes, I often give the exact same advice to most people. So, I thought I would take the feedback that I typically provide and summarize it in this article. I believe most of my resume advice works just as well for non-data roles as it does for data roles, so I think what I recommend can be applicable for anyone.
Please know that I am not a professional career coach. This article reflects my own point of view and not that of my employer, Microsoft.
Here are some resumes that I helped with, in before/after formats.
The included resumes are real, but personal identifiable information has been removed or changed, and permission has been given to use them.
See the difference? I have known all these people personally, so when I saw their resumes, I knew they could improve how they were representing their experience. Also, note that each resume is still very different.
So how did I help get these resumes from point A to point B? And what is the feedback that I tend to give over and over? Let’s break it down by component:
A resume broken out into components: Header, experience, education and miscellaneous.
Header
A header should contain your name, how to get in contact with you, and the most important things you want to highlight to the hiring manager or recruiter.
How long does it take a recruiter to decide if you’re right for a job? It’s actually around seven seconds, according to eye-tracking research.*
This means that sometimes a recruiter might not even get to your experience! That’s why I love a good resume summary. This allows you to tell the hiring manager why you’re qualified, why you’re interested, and why you’re different from other candidates. The summary is also a great place to highlight recent achievements (such as a new degree or certification), or to explain why you are interested in changing industries or type of job. It is also a straightforward way to personalize your resume for each role that you’re applying for with very little effort.
Writing a resume summary can be challenging — I’m still not happy with mine! It’s important that it be genuine and have substance, but without too many buzzwords, being too long, or having too many details. I recommend avoiding platitudes and clichés such as “self-starter,” “motivated,” “rock star,” and “unicorn,” but don’t be afraid to emphasize your soft skills. And remember, a summary should not be more than three sentences.
Here is a recent example that I used when applying to an analytics consulting company (as I mentioned, I tweak my summary for each company to personalize my resume, so this is just one example):
Riesling is a full-stack data scientist with an MS in Analytics who gravitates toward Analytics Engineering to ensure data quality and usability. As demonstrated by her success in a wide variety of companies across B2B and B2C, Riesling learns quickly, adapts, and finds ways to improve data infrastructure to accelerate data science. In addition to her core responsibilities, Riesling functions as team “glue” to help a team become stronger together — above all she likes improving processes and helping people.
Information that must be in your header includes:
- First and last name
- Phone number
- Summary
Information that could be in your header includes:
- LinkedIn address or other relevant social media presences
- Professional/business website
- GitHub or other portfolios
- Work eligibility
Information not to have in your header includes:
- Your personal address: Remember, you are sending your resume to strangers. There is no reason they need to know where you live
- Personal social media
- Inactive ways to contact you
Experience
The experience section is the heart of the resume and is meant to convince the recruiter to call you, or the hiring manager to interview you.
Your resume is a document to tell the hiring manager why you are qualified for the role they need, not to list out what you have done in the past. Your experience section should reflect that — leave out details and positions that are not relevant to the role (or that you didn’t enjoy) and emphasize and elevate aspects of previous experiences that are applicable.
This section should be filled with the work you did, its scope, and its impact — this is the place for metrics! This section does not need to include the tools or packages that you used; each company may have a different tech stack and is likely to trust that if you know how to solve a problem, you’ll find the right solution with the resources available. (Plus, you will highlight your tech skills in the “skills” section further down.)
Here are some tips that I have given for the experience section:
- The most important and relevant elements should take up the most space. This means that recent roles typically take up more space than past roles (and yes, this means deleting bullet points for previous roles that helped you get your current position — and yes, even if an old position had a longer duration!). But, if a previous role is more like what you want to do than your current role, then it should take up more space to highlight that you have that experience.
- List the most important and relevant experience at the top for each role because people tend not to read your entire resume. But keep roles in chronological order.
- Use action verbs up front to describe what you did.
- Be sure to include metrics that highlight your impact. It’s okay if these are approximate.
- Be consistent — this includes using consistent date formats, ending all bulleted list items with or without periods, using the same colors and fonts, and more.
- Do not use acronyms without defining them or words that the average person wouldn’t understand. Industry standard terms like IT, B2C, and SaaS may be okay, but when you get into words that you use every day, but others may not, remember to define them.
- Anything you are currently doing should be in the present tense. Anything you completed, as well as all previous roles, should be described in the past tense.
- Remove work that is from more than 10 years ago.
- Don’t lie or “extend” the truth.
Some before and after statements, along with the feedback that was given:
- Before: Prepared data for feature scoping and conducted analysis of 10+ A/B tests
- Feedback: Put the important and measurable stuff up front. And remember that results are more important than preparation.
- After: Supported 10+ A/B tests including results analysis and feature scoping
- Before: Using PySpark on Azure Databricks, combined and cleaned multiple datasets with hundreds of millions of auto insurance claims, and conducted a statistical analysis with visualizations to identify factors associated with adjudication times and help [employer] reduce these times
- Feedback: This is wordy and long. I might split this into two bullets — the first talking about the analysis, and the second about the results. Also remember that what you did is more important than the tools you used.
- After:
Identified factors correlated with long adjudication times through statistical analysis and data visualizations
Reduced adjudication times by X% based recommendations A, B, and C from the identified factors
- Before: Assisted in the creation of an $80,000 budget through Microsoft Excel determining how much money to allocate to each event
- Feedback: Reduce wordiness by changing “Assisted in the creation of an” to “Co-created”. I would also remove the tooling.
- After: Co-created $80,000 budget, ensuring funds for all planned events
- Before: Contract negotiation
- Feedback: How many contracts? With whom?
- After: Negotiation of an annual average of 50 contracts with customers and vendors
- Before: Team leadership and talent acquisition
- Feedback: I know you have real hiring and management experience. I also think it’s incredibly impressive that you did this while balancing a full-time course load!
- After: Hired, managed, and scheduled a team of seven while working as a full-time student
- Before: Designed a conceptual idea of a quadrotor for transportation use
- Feedback: I had to do an online search to understand the meaning of quadrotor, but you’re saying you designed an unmanned flying vehicle for personal transportation?! That’s nuts. Also, what “customer problem” were you trying to solve with the quadrotor?
- After: Designed a conceptual transportation quadrotor (unmanned flying vehicle) as a creative, innovative, and bold way to solve the growing Atlanta traffic problem
- Before: Led a team of two analysts in development of new KPIs
- Feedback: This was actually on my resume! When I was in an interview, it was clear the interviewer thought I had people management experience from leading a team, which I didn’t have. I didn’t want anyone to think I was lying on my resume, so I wanted to represent this experience more appropriately.
- After: Led a project with two junior analysts’ bandwidth in development of new KPIs
Education
The education section may be more straightforward, but I often provide the following feedback:
- Put education at the bottom of your resume unless you recently graduated from a full-time program. Your work experience is more relevant and more recent so it should appear earlier.
- Do not include GPA, clubs, or dean’s list semesters after you have a full-time job.
- You don’t need to list your graduation year, especially if you have any concerns about age discrimination. Your age may be easier to deduce if you have included fewer than 10 years of work experience, but once you have more than 10 years — and assuming you’ve omitted older experience as I’ve advised earlier — it may be less easy for readers to deduce your age.
- You can include relevant coursework, but I often find that this just takes up space and doesn’t add much value.
Miscellaneous
This is for all the other material that can appear on your resume. It typically is near the bottom (either right before or right after education).
Skills
The skills section is a must have. This is a concise list of the tools, platforms, and other skills that you have that are relevant for the role. This is where a data hiring manager will be looking for SQL, Python or R, a BI platform, a work management tool, a workflow engine, web analytics tooling, stakeholder management, and soft skills. It’s always good to read the job description to find the skills being sought for the role, and make sure to list them (or at least list something in the category, such as Power BI or Tableau). Here are some additional tips:
- Be sure that if someone asks “tell me about a time you exhibited [skill X]” that you have a story for each one.
- Remove skills that are a given (such as experience with the Microsoft Office suite or Slack — they’re made to be easy to learn), or that you haven’t touched in years (that one Java class you might have taken in college does not mean Java is a skill eight years later if you haven’t used it since), or that aren’t relevant to the role (it’s cool that you know Photoshop, but no data role is likely to require Photoshop).
- Put skills into logical groupings if you have too many — for example, you can separate soft skills from coding languages.
Personal interests
I tend to leave off personal interests unless I have a reason to include them. Here are some examples of when they might be appropriate:
- If you have interests related to the role. For example, once I applied to NPR, so I put all my favorite podcasts on my resume as “personal interests.”
- When I was graduating from college, I put my clubs and club leadership positions as “personal interests” because I didn’t have as much real substance to put on my resume to fill the space or show experience.
Other elements you can include
- Awards
- Public speaking
- Published papers
- Portfolio projects
- Poster presentations
- Links to public work
Other tips
- Don’t include anything that might make someone dislike you — even subconsciously. This includes things like a photo, an unconventional font that you like, personal interests, and more.
- Keep your resume to a single page, and two pages at maximum (and only if you have enough experience to fill the two pages and at least 10 years of experience).
- Be sure everything is grammatically correct. This means no spelling mistakes, run-on sentences, or other issues. Ask a friend to read through it to be sure!
- I use a two-column resume, which I love because it provides a bit more space for me, and I find it easier to read on mobile. But some people dislike it, and I’ve heard that text parsers don’t always work on multiple columns, which could make it harder to get through auto screeners.
- That being said, I don’t typically rely on auto screeners. I always try to get a referral to the place I am looking to work by networking and finding friends of friends who might know of an open role for which I would be a good fit. For a good introduction to networking, check out my other article: Networking 101: Make the Most Out of Your LinkedIn Connection Requests | by Riesling Meyer | June, 2022 | Medium
Conclusion
I hope these tips are helpful and not overwhelming. My “TLDR” for resume feedback is usually:
- Be sure to include a summary to tell the hiring manager why you’re qualified, why you’re interested, and why you’re different from other candidates.
- Your resume is a one-page document to tell the hiring manager why you are qualified for the role they need, not to list out what you have done in the past. Your experience section should reflect that; leave out details that are not relevant to the role.
As I mentioned previously, I am not a professional career coach. These are just my personal opinions that I have seen work. If you have any resume tips that I missed, I would love to hear them! Please include them in the Comments section below. Also, check out my related article on my experiences changing roles during my data science career, linked below.
Sources
Riesling Meyer is on LinkedIn.
