In my previous articles I have talked about what makes a great Cloud Engineer and how to become one. AWS is one of the leading service vendors in the market and many people want to cash in on a possible opportunity in the domain. Hence we see a lot of people wanting to get AWS Certified. Once certified, the next step is to build a resume that would help you get recognized and thus end up with a job opportunity. In this article, I would be discussing all the nitty-gritty concerning an AWS resume.
Resume Building
The resume is your first impression in front of an interviewer. It is the first & most crucial step towards your goal. There are two ways in which you can build your resume:
- Chronological: This is the traditional way of building a resume where you mention your experience in the manner it took place. This type of resume is preferred in conservative fields.
- Functional: This is a whole new approach where you mention your most relevant experience based on the required skills. Here your recruiter doesn’t have to go through the whole resume to find out the required skills. This is a more focused and concise way of portraying yourself in front of an interviewer.
The first thing which you need to keep in mind is, your resume should be consistent, concise & clear in terms of format & the message that you are trying to convey,
- Keep your resume updated. Building or updating your resume is really tiresome, but the more time you invest in building one, the higher are the chances of you getting selected. Recruiter receives hundreds of resumes for a single job, and your resume is the one which will help you clear the first round for you.
- For someone, with less than 8 years of experience should have a single page resume. You should at most carry a two page resume. After two pages the resume becomes lengthy and the interviewer becomes uninterested in reading it.
- Try to make a functional resume if you have 2+ years of experience, where you only put the relevant experience rather than flooding it with everything.
- Give priorities to those skills which are required for that particular job. It’s always better to build a custom resume for each & every job.
- List the activities & mentioning your role in that activity. This is where you showcase your interpersonal skills such as leadership, team player etc. Also, list the awards that you have achieved to prove your potential in different fields.
- Your hobbies play an important role in breaking the ice with the interviewer. This section also shows that you are an all-rounder with various skills & hobbies.
Now lets have a look at how to build AWS Resume:
AWS Resume
Now talking specifically about Big Data Engineer Resume, apart from your name & personal details, the first section should be your work experience.
AWS Resume: Work Experience
You should always start with the relevant work experience which will quickly draw your recruiter’s attention. It should state the responsibilities which you have taken & your learning from them in a very concise, crisp and clear manner.
You can divide your experience in the following parts:
- Designation
- Name of the Organisation
- Duration of Employment
- Job responsibilities in brief
- Your learning or experience from that job
Here is a sample AWS resume:
EXPERIENCE: AWS Solutions Architect – Netflix
July 2015 – Present
Worked as an AWS Solutions Architect in team where I was expected to build and maintain infrastructure that could store, process & manage the huge amount of data collected from various sources. Netflix as we know deals with both streaming and stationary data it was important to consider scalability requirements.
- Collaborated with various team & management to understand the requirement & design the complete system
- Experience in guiding the classification, plan, implementation, growth, adoption and compliance to enterprise architecture strategies, processes and standards
- Designed and developed highly scalable and available systems
- Worked with services like EC2, Lamba, SES, SNS, VPC,CloudFront, CloudFormation etc,
- Demonstrated expertise in creating architecture blueprints and detailed documentation. Created bill of materials, including required Cloud Services (such as EC2, S3 etc.) and tools
- Involved in the end to end deployment process
- There are some key points to be kept in mind while building your resume.
There are some key factors in the above resume which will not only give you an upper hand but will also impress your employer. Please take a note of following pointers:
- Try to mention the versions of software & frameworks.
- Looking at the job description you can tweak your experience likewise & mention those tools & skills which are required by the organization.
- You need to understand that there are a plethora of services and tools for a single purpose and you can’t master all of them. So, instead of just mentioning the tools’ or framework’s name, I would advise adding a small description about your knowledge & involvement with the tool. This would also help the interviewer to figure out that if you don’t have the experience with the exact same tool, you have that experience with another tool.
AWS Resume: Technical Skills
After the Job Experience, I recommend you create a Technical skill section where you can list your technical skills. You can put all the skills that you think are required for the job role, or the skills with which you are confident. This is what a sample skill set should look like:
Sample:
TECHNICAL SKILLS:
- Ability to understand Migration requirements and bridge the gaps
- Expertise in architecture blueprints and detailed documentation. Create bill of materials, including required Cloud Services (such as EC2, S3 etc.) and tools
- Hands-on experience with EC2, ECS, ELB, EBS, S3, VPC, IAM, SQS, RDS, Lambda, Cloud Watch, Storage Gateway, Cloud formation, Elastic Beanstalk and Autoscaling
- Demonstrable experience with developer tools like Code Deploy, CodeBuild, Code Pipeline, design the overall Virtual Private Cloud VPC environment, including server instance, storage instances, subnets, high availability zones, etc
AWS Resume: Achievements & Hobbies
After this, the next section should be Achievements & Hobbies. Try not to mention too many achievements or hobbies, as it could distract your interviewer & he/she might miss the important ones. Mention a few, which are relevant & with which you are confident.
Fact that your resume would be screened by different companies it is important to understand the industry requirements, here are a few sample job descriptions that companies require you to have.
JD by IBM For AWS Solutions Architect
JD by TCS for AWS IOT Architect
JD Brillio for AWS Architect
From the above JD’s it is clear that industries are looking for professionals with varying skills and job roles that may touch up different roles. An AWS Engineer is normally classified into three categories that concern three different job roles:
1. AWS Solutions Architect
These are the individuals who will be involved in designing the infrastructure and applications. Therefore, they must possess advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the Cloud platform. Simply speaking, they are responsible for creating blueprints of application designs. Get in-depth knowledge of Cloud Computing, AWS Architectural Principles, Migrating Applications on Cloud, and more with the AWS Cloud Course.
These are some of their responsibilities:
- Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, available, fault-tolerant, and reliable applications on the Cloud
- Selecting appropriate Cloud services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements
- Migrating complex, multi-tier applications on Cloud Platforms
- Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on Cloud Platforms
- Implementing cost-control strategies
This video on “AWS Full Course” is a complete AWS Tutorial for beginners who want to learn AWS from scratch with examples and Hands-on. This AWS tutorial will help you learn various AWS services like AWS EC2, AWS S3, AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS VPC, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudFront, AWS CloudWatch and more. After watching this video you have skills of an AWS Solution Architect and you will clear AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification in one go.
2. AWS Developer
It is pretty clear from the title that these individuals are responsible for coding and development of applications. They are expected to have knowledge of the best practices related to Cloud architecture. Cloud Developers also develop, deploy, and debug cloud-based applications. They are expected to have:
- Expertise in at least one high-level programming language
- Skills for developing, deploying & debugging cloud applications
- Skills in API usage, command line interface and SDKs for writing applications
- Knowledge of key features of Cloud Service Providers
- Understanding of application lifecycle management
- Ability to use continuous integration and distribution pipelines to deploy applications
- Ability to code to implement essential security measures
- Skills in writing, correcting and debugging code modules
- Code writing skills for serverless applications
- Understanding in the use of containers in development processes
You can even check out the details of AWS Developer with the AWS DevOps Certification Training.
3. AWS System Operations Engineer
These individuals are system administrators who take over once the application is designed and developed. They are responsible for managing and monitoring most of the activities that follow the development process. They should possess the following skills:
- Relevant experience as a systems administrator in a systems operations role
- Ability to work with virtualization technology
- Experience in monitoring and auditing systems
- Knowledge of networking concepts (e.g., DNS, TCP/IP, and firewalls)
- Ability to translate architectural requirements
- Ability to deploy, manage, and operate scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant systems
- Knowhow to implement and control the flow of data, to and from a service provider
- Capability to select the appropriate services based on compute, data, or security requirements
- Ability to estimate usage costs and identify operational cost control mechanisms
- Capability to migrate on-premises workload to service providers
Now that all the nitty gritty that are important to standard AWS resume are discussed, let us see how can we actually build an AWS resume:
A better understanding of these concepts can be got from the AWS Solutions Architect Training.
So this is it guys, I hope this AWS resume blog has helped you in figuring out how to build an attractive & effective resume. I have also written an AWS Salary blog which you may want to take a look at so that you get detailed information about how much money would you make as an AWS professional.
In case of queries, you can put those in the comments section below, and we would revert at the earliest.