Hi, I’m Jen.
I have years of experience hiring data analysts, and I’ve worked as an analyst myself.
I know everything your resume needs to really stand out so you can get your next job in
analytics.
In this video, I’ll teach you my top tips that your resume must have and how to communicate
them effectively.
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We cover everything about careers and specifically everything you need to get your next job in
analytics or another technical career.
Let’s look at what should be on your resume.
I’m going to break this down into two major areas.
The first is what you should put on there in terms of content, and the second area is
how you should communicate it so it comes across effectively.
When we look at the what should be on your resume, the first thing is math or statistical
skills.
Talk about any training or degrees you have here.
What have you done that proves that you have a good mathematical foundation for the job?
Think about your education, think about how you can communicate using these skills in
a business setting, and that’s the type of thing that employers are going to be looking
for.
The next type of content that must be on your resume is something related to programming
skills.
If you’re getting into analytics, chance are that you have some sort of programming
skills, and if you don’t, I’d really recommend you taking time to at least learn one of the
languages.
You can learn them for free.
There are plenty of resources online to do this.
Whether it’s Python, R, SAS, or SQL even, definitely be sure to list programming skills
on your resume.
Again, when we talk about how to communicate them, we’re going to be talking about what have you done to
effectively use them in the jobs where you’ve made use of these skills.
Data visualization is the third type of content you’ll need to have on your resume.
While it used to be an optional thing, or a leading edge type of skill to have, it has
become the baseline expectation.
You should know how to create static and dynamic reports and how to make sure they’re really
communicating you really know what you’re talking about and helping other people understand
them.
If you don’t have these skills today, again, look at plenty of free options that are out
there, whether it’s Power BI, Excel, Tableau, ClickView, tons of great resources are out
there for you to learn these.
This is something you definitely wasn’t to have on your data analyst resume.
The 4th type of content you’ll need to communicate is your communication skills.
You may be a great technical wizard, but again you need to know how to translate this to
the business world.
You’re often going to be sharing the results of your work with people that have no idea
what the details behind it are.
They probably think there’s a little black magic and wizardry in what you’re doing,
so being able to make it sound simple and clear for them is going to be very important.
This is definitely a skill you’ll want to communicate you have.
If you don’t have any of these four skills, take time to learn how to use different ones
of them and to develop them on your own time.
I’m curious what skills you’re working on developing now.
You can let me know in the comments below.
While we’re talking about communication, let’s look at the other key part that your
resume needs to have.
And that’s you need to be able to clearly communicate all of those skills that you have
as an analyst or data scientist.
As a hiring manager, I’m always looking for how well people can articulate what they’ve
done before.
It helps me also see how they’re going to function in the business.
As a hiring manager, I always look at a resume and treat it as though someone had pretty
much an unlimited amount of time to put this document together, so they should be able
to communicate to me really clearly what their skills are and how they could benefit me.
If the resume is full of errors or really technical, I might understand it, but I’ll
still have concerns that when you’re working in the business that you might not be able
to communicate with the people who are more business and less technical.
That really just touched on my second tip, which is being able to communicate in business
terms.
Use the technical terms where needed, so don’t feel like you can’t mention the programming
languages, again I do want to know about those, but turn them into business terms.
What did you do to save money, or generate revenue, or improve processes, or reduce the
amount of work time as a result of what you did?
Those are the types of things that businesses care about, and even if it goes through an
HR rep or recruiter that doesn’t understand the technical details, they’ll still be
able to read your resume and be impressed by it.
Being able to break things down in business terms is really a key skill to have.
That leads into my third key way to communicate on your resume.
Tell me how you’re going to help me.
This doesn’t mean that I want you to say “I’d help this company by blah blah blah.”
and don’t just put it in the cover letter.
Tell me through the skills that you choose to highlight on your resume what you’re
going to do for me.
If I’m hiring you as an analyst because I need to predict future failures or predict
the future cost of a product, tell me how you’ve done that before.
How have you predicted failures or predicted cost or predicted anything for that matter.
Anything that you can do to correlate your past work with the expectations of the job
I’m hiring you for is really going to help me see the connection and see what you’re
going to do for me.
In this video, I’ve focused on the specific skills and communication methods you’ll
need on your data analyst resume.
But there’s some other thing you’ll want to keep in mind on any resume you write, data
analyst included.
If you want to know more about applicant tracking systems which are going to screen your resume
before they make it to me as a hiring manager or even to the recruiter then check out my
video.
I’ve linked it so you can find out how all of this stuff is processed by a computer before
it makes it to a person.
It makes sense that especially when we’re working in jobs that are technical and make
people’s lives easier, of course our resumes are going to the same process.
If you’re looking for a new job and want to know the most critical steps you can take
to make it a success, I’ve linked to my cheat sheet below.
It will walk you through the top items you must do to land your next job.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you come back and check us out in future videos.