What To Include in Your CV

There are hundreds of articles on how to properly draw up a CV. In this article, we will look at what you can do to insert the information about it later into your CV. Participation in all these activities develops both your hard skills and soft skills, and recently they are especially relevant.

1) Open Source

Participating in open source projects will give you the skill of reading code and experience working with large projects, and most importantly, it will show your employer that you can put your skills into practice. Reading code well is very important. At first, you will spend most of your time at the company reading the code and understanding the project. Therefore, the skill to understand the code on your own will help you a lot.

Which Open Source Project To Choose

These can be well-known frameworks or small programs like calendars or a system for keeping track of students. If there is an opportunity, look for projects that are as close as possible to the requirements of the companies where you want to work. However, it is quite difficult to find them, since development in companies and open source projects very often significantly differs. Open source projects rarely use frameworks. On the other hand, this is an advantage, as it allows you to enter development only with knowledge of the language.

It is better to describe in your CV the result you have achieved, for example:

• I have accelerated the application start time by 30%.
• I have fixed the problem with the program on macOS.

2) Hackathons

There are many hackathons of different levels. Some don’t even require deep knowledge of programming languages. At these hackathons, you can chat with people from the IT sphere, as well as get feedback on your code.

In your CV, you can mention the name of the hackathon and the place you have taken. If you have not won prizes, then you can write the number of points given to you by the judges.

• 3rd place in the Hack NU hackathon

3) Pet Project

You can mention your project that used popular technologies. A list of popular technologies can be taken from the job descriptions. Creating your own project will strengthen your knowledge and increase your understanding of project development.

However, there is an important note that the project must be properly executed.

What will not fit:

• I have created an online store selling cars. The project has a purchase function, there is a customer role. There is the main menu.

Instead, describe the result you have achieved:

• Added a connection pool to increase performance
• Introduced transactions to the service
• Created the infrastructure for integration tests

4) Competetive Programming

The level of problem-solving skills depends on the company where you want to be. As my teaching practice has shown, solving 20-40 easy-level tasks significantly improves your programming skills. It is also useful to regularly solve intermediate-level tasks; however, you do not need to try to solve everything. Sort tasks in order of popularity. They are usually not very difficult, but they will make you think.

If you are carried away and are good at solving tasks, try participating in various competitions. In your CV, you can indicate the name of the competition, the place you took, and the total number of participants. If you have not won any prizes, then you can indicate the number of tasks that you have solved.

• Solved 200 tasks at acmp.ru

5) Mentoring

This option is a good choice for those who already have good knowledge of the language, but no one bothers you to try. Hackathons, where schoolchildren or elementary students take part, are well-suited. You will be able to help them to solve tasks and point out bugs in their projects. As a rule, mistakes are quite platitudinous.

Start teaching your friends. This will help to structure your knowledge, as well as expand on this topic in the interview.

Don’t forget that your CV should contain one page. Mentoring can be indicated in the “volunteering” column in one line. You can provide more complete information on your profile pages.

6) Articles

Write articles about programming, perhaps for beginners. For example, describe what variables and objects are, make diagrams, and make the material easy to read. This can also be done during training because writing articles helps to better understand the topic.

This is also where I would like to include writing documentation in open source projects since you will first need to understand the code.

This experience can be listed in your CV if you do not have higher priority achievements. On the websites, you can specify more detailed information, a couple of lines will be enough.

Conclusion

You should perceive this guide as an idea for your development, an opportunity to gain relevant experience that will help you to establish yourself as a serious person who intends to build a career in the IT field. A good CV will set you apart from the rest of the candidates. The correct formulation of all the activities mentioned above will help you with this.