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Developer Careers Guide 9: Career History

Your career history should be presented with the current/most recent company first, and then others in reverse chronological order.

Present every company in the same font, size, and format. Include the company name, time period that you were employed and your job title.

Beneath this you should include a very brief description of the company type/industry and a sentence to describe what the project was trying to achieve. Do not assume that a new employer will know what another company does.

Next you should include at least a paragraph on what you did whilst you were there. Start with details of the department you worked in and/or the projects you worked on. Write about your main responsibilities and include any major achievements, successes or problems that you resolved. Include any other responsibilities you had including mentoring staff, or speaking to clients. There is no need to include your reason for leaving, as this is far easier to discuss in an interview.

Finish by summarising all of the main skills you used in the position.

Here is an example:

Jun 2010 – Jul 2012

JP Morgan

Senior Software Developer    

JP Morgan is a leading American investment bank with offices in the City of London. While there I worked on a web based trading application.

I worked as a technical lead on the project to create a RESTful web service as part of an existing Java web application. I took responsibility for integrating the architecture for the new features with the existing systems, including rebuilding and extending the data access framework using Hibernate. I introduced Spring for dependency injection. The database in use was MySql.

I introduced automated acceptance testing to supplement the unit tests already running on JUnit, and encouraged the development team to move towards test driven development (TDD). By the end of the project all of the team were writing tests first for new code.

Continuous Integration was in place using Hudson with Maven to manage builds and dependencies. In this role I learned how to configure builds using Maven in order to extend the existing build scripts, and integrate these into Hudson to ensure the new features were included in the CI system.

We made use of a number of design patterns including MVC, factory, Singleton and builder.

Technologies used: Java, Spring Core, Spring MVC, Hibernate, Log4j, JSON, RESTful Web Services, MySql, Eclipse, JUnit, Hudson, Maven, Continuous integration

More tips:

  • Do not use up space on long descriptions for irrelevant non-technical roles unless you learned relevant skills such as problem solving or attention to detail.
  • Do explain any gaps in your CV. For example: Between January 2012 June 2012 I was travelling across Asia.

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