hello. could you guys and gals be kind and have a look at my CV and let me know what you think?
BTW i would love to connect with people with the same professional interest. so you can also follow me on twitter @MohseniAshkan
EDIT: so after looking for jobs in a half-arsed manner and not being very optimistic, i got two interview and got accepted for an internship position with one of them. so my advice to you guys? well just follow the advice on the link at the bottom (which is written by a guy who hires people in the gaming industry) and do not worry so much about the layout. on top of that i would like to stress that make sure you have no spelling and grammar mistakes and also put the most important/relevant stuff first. also make sure you do it in no more than 2 pages. if you don’t have much relevant experience (which i assume is the case since you are here!) then it is fine to take two pages, since you probably need to explain the things you have done and how it has prepared you for a job in the gaming industry and stuff like that, whereas people with experience just need to give their experience in bullet points format and therefore can do it in one page.
here is the link:
I avoided using “I” since when writing essays and stuff at university they always said use “it was done like that” rather than “I did it like that” if that is what you mean.
As a writing instructor at a college, I say this is usually bad advice in practical writing.
Passive voice is used by academics to present an (often false) impression of authority. This is because passive voice eliminates the individual actor from the discussion and focuses strictly on his or her ideas. However, a CV is all about you, the individual, and what you’ve done.
always love a great and interesting piece of information TBH just as i left that comment i actually thought of the fact that it is about me and i am trying to sell my skills so probably i COULD use “I” but wasnt sure which way to go.
thanks
The audio synchronization shows some mastery of more complex logic. If this was a project you took on solo or played a key role in, then I would do more to highlight the project and what you did to implement it rather than “music and models were taken from elsewhere”.
You gotta consider that everyone and their mom is making platformers, and the skills you applied in this game may be extremely transferable to a platformer or an endless runner or a variety of games being made in huge numbers. That yours features an excellent execution, and features some more complex and esoteric logic - I think that you might be pretty a pretty desirable entry level candidate.
It’s worth noting that this is in spite of your resume, which is not great.
Active or passive voice is not all that relevant. What you need to do is rapidly explain what you did and how it’s applicable to a project that the hiring manager may be interested in.
The point of a resume is just to screen a candidate, as a hiring manager - what I’m wondering looking at a resume is:
“is he full of it / does he know how to code?”
after that, the question is:
“what can I have him do immediately after I hire him”.
You should frame the resume around answering that question: “how am I useful?”. If this is a game dev position, then you really want to put that game front and center.
jeez… writing a CV is almost as hard as making games and definitely less enjoyable. but u gotta do what u gotta do! i think i am gonna have to do it in two pages.
thanks guys, really appreciate your help. i am gonna make more changes and upload it again
I noticed a couple of times where you’ve explained things that feel like they shouldn’t need explaining. You don’t need to tell us that A is the highest grade (you’d hardly list low grades there, right?), or the details of the robot experiments (just tell us what specific part of the problem you were working on), and we don’t care about the selection process for your school council (saying you were elected should suffice).
When setting context don’t use any more words than you absolutely need. People reading this want to hear about you, not about election processes or experiment conditions.
In other places you’re a bit vague. For the line following robot you helped “write code”. What does that mean? What problems were you responsible for solving as a part of the group working on that robot. What role did the code you wrote play in that?
Just knowing you can write code doesn’t tell me why I should hire you over anyone else. Be specific and to the point, and focused on yourself.
Combining those for the line following robot, it could be something like: “I was involved in a group project to design and build a robot to follow a path marked as a line as quickly as possible. I wrote an image processing algorithm which determined the direction of the visible line in relation to the robot, which was used as the basis of its pathfinding.” A few of those will tell me the type of problem you have experience solving, and that’s where your particular value is. It’ll tell me why I want to hire you, instead of any other programmer who might happen by.
thank you angrypenguin. so i ended up changing a lot of things based on your feedback and others before you and uploaded the new version.
the reason i have said that is because nowadays the highest grade is A*. still i changed it from “A is the highest achievable grade” to “A USED TO BE the highest achievable grade”.
Still look super bad for me, I given you and advice and you seems to really don’t care. Is still looking like a novel, and bad page formatting.
Do yourself a favor and jump to LinkedIn and check some programmers CV’s who work for some famous company’s to see what you need to put in.
“18 months* experience in C++” - REALLY? C++ is huge… besides the fact that 2 years of C++ put you in rookie position, you should detail that as much as you can, like STL? Boost? frameworks? cross platform? and so on. But you put 1 single line here.
actually u are the only one who hasn’t given any good advice. just saying it is bad and looks like a novel is 0 help.
and yes i have just 18 months experience, i am rookie so what? doesn’t mean i still shouldnt try for a job or an internship.
18 months C++ experience is fine for junior/graduate jobs. I would be more concerned about the 6 months in other languages, they are not really going to be taken seriously. You’d probably be better off saying you have a working knowledge of those languages and leaving it at that.
It’s worth noting that the 18 months experience you have in C++ appears to come from your degree work. That will be looked at by employers as valued much less than experience while in a production role. I know that probably isn’t necessarily your fault having recently graduated, but you should know that that’s how harsh employers are when looking at CV’s.
Like I said though, graduate/junior positions are fair game for a CV like this.
I would probably suggest tweaking the format of your experience section, as it does come across as a wall of text. Cover the important points only, heck, bulletpoint it even. But make sure you have a part of the CV where you do talk about yourself, it’s good to get a feel for your personality in some sense, even if just a sentence.
Also, remove the footnotes, and make sure you are starting all sentences the same way (one bullet says knowledge, another says Knowledge). Small things, but they can be enough to make the fickle CV selector put it in the wrong pile.
Dude, I’ve give you the Europass link as a starting point. This is almost a standard in EU. And is official EU site, free and help you a little. I’ve told you to check LinkedIn, because you will find a lot of useful things.
I can’t write the CV for you, you must do it.
Not losing my time here anymore, sorry. And good luck!
