Data engineering is a hot field right now. With salaries well over $100,000 and 75,000 available jobs, it’s tempting to consider a career change. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have entire teams of recruiters looking to find great data engineers to add to their teams.
But even with so much demand for data engineers, it can be difficult for applicants to be noticed. Employers spend less than 11 seconds viewing a resume before deciding if they want to accept or reject it. Knowing this, it’s critical to design your resume to really highlight key skills and projects that demonstrate your value and experience as a data engineer.
Constantly Update Your Resume
Data engineering, like most fields in tech, is constantly and quickly evolving. Relevant skills and software for data engineers in 2019 might be old news by 2021. To really help your resume stand out above the rest, become a continual learner.
Constantly stay up-to-date on the data engineering field through publications, podcasts, online forums, courses, and other research. Once you’ve learned a new skill and feel comfortable talking about it in an interview, it’s ready to be added to your resume.
Specific topics for data engineers to stay aware of include machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and data analysis. As you learn new skills in these areas, try to incorporate them into real-world projects that you can link to from your resume.
Showcase Positive Business Outcomes
While data engineering is an incredibly scientific and technical field, it’s hard to ignore that the work has very real attachments to business. What data engineers do every day has a big impact on business intelligence. Through their efforts, companies can find success. Highlighting these results will definitely turn the heads of recruiters.
For instance, maybe your work as a data engineer helped deliver data to data analysts faster, which in turn helped them spend more time analyzing the data and making helpful business conclusions.
Or perhaps your work automating a data pipeline eliminated bugs and increased efficiency. Maybe by suggesting a new tool or process, you were able to save your company money. These stories prove your value as a worker to a company with an open position.
Describe Your Experience Using Data Engineering Tools
While a list of skills and tools you’re familiar with is useful for a quick scan of your resume and most definitely should be included, it’s important to also paint a picture of how and why you used tools in your previous jobs or projects.
When describing a former role or a project you participated in, mention software and data engineering skills by name. Doing this proves your experience and gives interviewers a place to start when asking you questions.
For example, to discuss data pipelines in your resume, could just say “Managed data pipelines” and that would get your point across. But to be much more clear and impressive, you could say “Managed production data pipelines with Airflow and increased efficiency by 20%.” This shows that you performed a skill (managing data pipelines) and have experience with a specific tool (Airflow).
Your Career as a Data Engineer
The hardest part of starting a new career is landing that first job. It’s critical to showcase your education and skills in a way that relates to real-world experience.
By taking courses on data engineering through Udacity, you will not only learn the skills relevant to the role of data engineering, you’ll also complete projects that clearly demonstrate your ability to work competently in a job-like scenario.
Check out Udacity’s Data Engineering Nanodegree program today!
