Infographic Resume: A Creative Way to Present Your Credentials

By Peter Newfield

https://careerresumes.com/infographic-resume-a-creative-way-to-present-your-credentials/

How do you stand out from the crowd when the world is mostly online?  An infographic resume is one answer.

Adding An Infographic Attitude

Information noise is increasing every day.  We don’t read, we scan. You can counteract this overwhelm by creating an infographic resume.  Typically, recruiters only take 7 seconds to look at a single resume.

Adding infographic elements to your resume is one way to grab that attention back. We see graphics in a totally different way than plain text. It pops and we read it like we look at a painting. You can use this to your advantage in your job hunt. Infographics are increasingly used in advertising and social media marketing, so they’re easily recognizable.  If you’re already in a creative field, it’s a great way to showcase your talents, but no matter what your career path is, visually representing your data is a modern and up to date method to get your point across.

Related: Things to Include in a Creative Industry Resume

How to Get Started With Your Infographic Resume

First, gather your information. You might want to represent it in an easily movable way like with sticky notes or index cards.  You will likely have more data points than will fit within a graphic representation of your resume, so the next step is to create an outline.  Try arranging all the elements of your resume in different ways,  see what fits and what doesn’t fit, both thematically and visually.  In graphic design, less is more, and when you’re making an infographic resume, you’re putting on your graphic design hat.

After you’ve created an outline and decided which parts of your resume should be represented and which should be cut, it’s time to choose your color scheme and begin to visualize the information. Make sure that you’re creating a logical structure to your information with clear flow and layout. Timelines, pie charts, graphs, and icons are all excellent ways to visualize data and represent it graphically.  Analyze your outline to see what parts of your resume can be rendered into graphs or represented by icons.

Once you’ve got some idea of how you’re going to represent your data visually, it’s time to choose the colors. Again, less is more.  Choose one dominant color and then one or two colors to complement and create accents. Then stick to those colors. If you really must add another color element, consider using a medium or light grey to create contrast without visually overstimulating the viewer.  There are infographic templates and makers available online that can help you to make something based on sound design principles.

Less is always more when it comes to visually representing data. Choose what you share carefully and make it complement rather than repeat your traditional resume.

Related: Top 5 Reasons To Get Your Resume Updated Now

Some Do’s and Don’ts of Using Your Infographic Resume

• Do send both your infographic and your standard resume to prospective employers.
• Don’t use an infographic resume for executive-level positions.
• Do think carefully about your color choices and layout.
• Don’t overcrowd your infographic with too much information.
• Do have some fun with this flexible format.
• Don’t ignore the importance of your traditional resume.

Infographic resumes can be an excellent addition to your traditional resume, when you are looking to stand out from a large crowd of applicants or when you’re in a creative or marketing field. Take some time to research infographics and how to use them effectively if you’ve never made one before, and always make sure your resume is focused on your career goals.

Sales Engineer Career Path #3: Product Development

By Robert Schneider

It’s time for the next installment in the ongoing series about career paths for sales engineers seeking new opportunities. This time around, I’m going to talk about the pros and cons of moving into product development. Before I begin, it’s important to understand that this is one of the more challenging transitions, largely because the skills necessary to be an effective SE can be so different than those that characterize the most productive developers. With that said, here goes:

Pros

• Sense of ownership. SEs flit between opportunities; product developers stay involved throughout the lifecycle of the technology they’re building.
• Better base salary. In general (but not always), product developers earn a higher base salary than SEs.
• Less travel. If you’re tired of those 6 am flights to remote client sites, product development might be a welcome relief.
• Less variability. There are fewer subjective factors – such as client whims and sales representatives who can’t sell – that can block your achievements when you move into product development.

Cons

• Technically demanding. If your skills aren’t up to par, you’ll really need to put in the educational effort to meet the requirements of your new job.
• Less upside. While product developers may have a larger base salary, thanks to commission SEs can really hit the jackpot if they have a particularly good year.
• Risk of outsourcing. Don’t kid yourself: if your employer can save one dollar a year on your salary by moving your job offshore, they’ll do it. In contrast, it’s nearly impossible to outsource SEs.
• Less interaction with customers. Plenty of SEs really savor the opportunity to meet with prospects and clients; product developers rarely get the chance. Some SEs find being ‘chained to a desk’ to be too confining.

Making the transition

It’s a big leap to move from the sales organization to the product development team. Here are some steps that can make this migration less painful:

1. Find one or more champions in product development
2. Discretely meet with them to learn more about what it takes to succeed in their group
3. When ready, approach your manager and express your desire to make the change
4. Once you get the go-ahead, work with HR to find a position in product development
5. Work on a mutually agreeable timeline to switch roles

If you’re interested in being notified of future editions, subscribe to the blog or follow me on Twitter: @RD_Schneider. You can read other sales engineering-related posts here.

The Dunning Kruger Effect and Demos

By Peter Cohan

“In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.” [Wikipedia]

In other words, people often don’t know what they don’t know.  Interestingly,

“Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as ‘Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence’ (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person’s ignorance of a given activity’s standards of performance. Dunning and Kruger’s research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people’s ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.”

[Note:  I am certainly not saying that you are incompetent…!]

But consider:  In the field of software demos, have you been trained – and in what ways?

There are a number of potential areas of training with respect to software demos:

The product itself:

• Learning how your product operates – e.g., set-up, navigation and workflows.
• Learning what your product delivers – e.g., reports, dashboards, alerts, and problem resolution.
• Learning the surrounding technologies and infrastructure.

Presenting the product:

• Learning demo flow, scripts, and talk-tracks.
• Presenting workflows, individual screens, and deliverables.
• Communicating value.

Interacting with the customer:

• Engaging multiple players at multiple levels (execs, middle managers, staffers, admins).
• Managing questions.
• Working with customer champions and coaches.

This list goes on – this is a small starter set to spur conversation.

Now consider just two of these items, “presenting screens” and “communicating value”.  Have you been trained on how to do these?

Presenting Screens:

• What do you say? (And what does your customer hear and remember?)
• What is the customer looking at while you are speaking?
• What is the customer actually seeing?
• How do you use your mouse?
• How often do you apply annotation tools?
• Do you present meaningful color elements?
• Do you communicate graph information clearly?
• Are you “connecting the dots” for the customer?

Communicating Value:

• Are you communicating value?
• How compelling is the message?
• Are they your (vendor) value statements?
• How often do you communicate value?
• What does your customer hear and remember?

Perhaps it’s time to assess yourself – but not by yourself (due to the Dunning-Kruger effect!).

Start by asking a colleague, a mentor, or your manager to review an example demo – but be aware that they may be at a similar level of understanding as you are (particularly if they were the ones who provided the training!).

So, consider asking a customer or a 3^rd party to take a look at a sample demo or two.  Do you know what you don’t know?  What you learn could be enlightening!”

The Dunning–Kruger Effect – and Demos

https://greatdemo.com/