I did few groups of skills I have:
- Currently focusing on (skills I am interested in and best at)
- Relevant skills (git, agile development, tdd...)
- Also worked with (other tech I encountered during my career: DBs, languages, frameworks...)
Hope it helps.
ps. I would love to hear some thoughts on this problem from somebody that actually reads resumes
As a hiring manager, I see a lot of resumes, and I rarely see skills being cleanly defined; so most of the time I parse the descriptions of people's past jobs and determine what they were doing, and what questions I needed to focus on to get the information I needed to make a decision. Additionally, I will use key things in a resume as a reasoning to ask certain things. If someone mentions design patterns, then I will be asking them about design patterns. If someone said they worked on a project, I will ask them what their level of involvement was, and how they worked with others.
Personally I think it would be great to have a clearly delineated list of skills, grouped they way you do it. The reality is, when you look at a ton of resumes, you eventually follow your own 5-second rule. If a resume can't grab your attention within 5 seconds of skimming through it, then it's probably not worth your time (and it might seem harsh, but there's plenty you can pick-up on in that short amount of time).
It made me realise why so many HR agencies request the person's CV only to take the information and reformat it into the agencies style (which is generally boring, but sensible).
Don't get me wrong. I love unique CV's, but given the choice between 'unique' and 'useful' there's only one possible answer.
http://i.imgur.com/JG1IZLi.png
I built my resume based on few assumptions:
- There are people that go through hundreds of CVs a day
- There are people that take a look at just couple of them but want more details
- People from the first bullet if interested usually want more details
This made me thinking that I should probably get all basic information across as soon as possible and if people are interested they can find more details. Copy/paste from top of my resume:
> On the 1st page, you will find general information about me and what I have been focusing on since I started professionally programming about 5 years ago. The rest of the pages will provide more details and recommendation letters.
The first page is designed to help filter my resume second to show actual competencies. My job descriptions on the second page provide information on how different skills were used.