My Engineering Resume Over Time

In this article, I put together four resumes, with each representing a range of time during my professional and educational careers. You can find the resumes at the link here. Although there are only four shared, there were multiple revisions that went into making each one. The ones I’ve shared are the ones I used at various major points throughout my career; I have described each in the following paragraphs.

Our time travelling resume journey begins when I was an EE student at USF. Please refer to the “Timeline 1” resume from the link above. Around May of 2013, I was finishing up the Spring semester of 2013, was getting ready to go into my last semester of EE undergrad (graduated in December of 2013), and I was desperately looking for an internship. This was the resume I used to apply to multiple companies around the Tampa Bay area. I eventually ended up getting an internship at an RF/Microwave/Wireless Communications department at Jabil Circuit. Despite working for two other companies throughout school, Jabil Circuit in Saint Petersburg, Florida was my first and only engineering internship I had in college.

Moving down the line, let’s look at my next resume, “Timeline 2,” from the link above. At this point in time, February of 2014, I had graduated from USF with my EE undergrad, was working on my master’s degree in EE, and was working part time at Jabil Circuit. Although I very much enjoyed the learning aspect of school, and enjoyed the things I was doing at Jabil, I really needed a full time job. I was a single father, worked part time (full time when possible), and studied full time all throughout school; it was time to reap some of the benefits of becoming a degreed EE. I detailed this journey in the following articles: How I Got Started in EE and How I got Through Engineering School as a Single Parent. This resume helped me get my first full time engineering job as a Systems Engineer for GE Aviation in Pinellas Park, Florida. I would end up working here for just over three years.

Continuing into “Timeline 3,” I had worked for GE Aviation as a Systems Engineer for over three years, and had lived in the Tampa Bay area my whole life (about 27 years at that point – November 2016). It was time to move onto new territories, personally and professionally. This resume helped me get hired as an Electronics and Payloads Engineer for Northrop Grumman Corporation (NGC) in Melbourne, Florida.

We’ll conclude the resume time travel adventure at my most current resume, “Timeline 4.” At the time of writing this article (January 2021), I have worked for NGC for almost four years. I have had many roles and responsibilities at NGC, but have primarily worked as an Electronics and Payloads Engineer (E&P). To learn about the Aeronautics Systems sector of NGC, and to learn about the roles and responsibilities of an E&P Engineer, check out my articles here and here.

Before I wrap up this article entirely, I’d like to go over a few more things with regards to the content of the resumes, and also reflect on something I thought was funny. Number one, as a general note, and despite a few of the resumes being created and modified in Microsoft Word, all of the resumes were shared in the Google Docs format; however, they can easily be exported to Microsoft Word and/or PDF. For ease of saving and sharing, I try to do as much creating in Google Docs as possible. If the formatting appears a little bit “off,” it’s probably because it was created in Microsoft Word, and did not convert well to Google Docs format. Be aware of formatting differences when you convert between Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and PDF.

What was I doing before my first shared resume? In my early days of college, I worked as a maintenance technician and grounds keeper for an apartment complex, and then I worked for an IT department at a private school in downtown Tampa. Some of these duties have been detailed in the shared resumes, and also in some of my early articles referenced above. In high school, I worked as a camp counselor a few summers, and then worked as a line cook at Panera Bread for a few months before graduating from high school. Although purely for nostalgia, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any of my very early resumes from high school.

I previously mentioned that I had many revisions of each resume. It’s definitely a good idea to go through your current resume every few months, and update it with any new responsibilities and achievements you may have. One of the biggest things I noticed when looking at each revision of my “Timeline 1” resume is that I would update it every semester with the important classes I took, and with classes I was going to be taking. Along with adding things to my resume, I was also consistent with removing things I didn’t think were applicable, like an old job at Panera Bread as an example.

I thought about providing an internal resume, but realized my current internal resume is pretty much identical to my external resume, with the exception that my internal resume doesn’t have an opening statement. In one of my resumes I stated my reason for leaving each job, which is something I definitely wouldn’t put on an internal resume. Sure, you can probably put more proprietary information on an internal resume, but I haven’t found the need to do this for the internal positions I’ve applied to (I would be very careful doing this, especially if you work for the DoD).

Lastly, one of the funniest things I noticed when reminiscing about my past is that I’ve moved around a lot, both inside and outside of college. From around the time I started college (almost 12 years ago!) I don’t think I’ve stayed in one place for more than 3 years. Over the past 12 years, I’ve lived in 7 different homes!