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 will be discussing all the nitty-gritty concerning an AWS resume.
How to Build an AWS Resume?
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 in which it occurred. This type of resume is preferred in conservative fields.
- Functional: This is a whole new approach. You mention your most relevant experience based on the required skills. Here, your recruiter doesn’t have to go through the entire resume to find out the needed skills. This is a more focused and concise way of portraying yourself in front of an interviewer.
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that 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 it, the higher your chances of getting selected. A recruiter receives hundreds of resumes for a single job, and your resume is the one that will help you clear the first round.
- 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.
- If you have 2+ years of experience, try to make a functional resume that only includes the relevant experience rather than flooding it with everything.
- Give priority to the skills required for that particular job. It’s always better to build a custom resume for each job.
- List the activities & mention your role in those activities. This is where you showcase your interpersonal skills such as leadership, being a 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, let’s have a look at how to build an AWS Resume:
Things to Include in AWS Resume with Examples
Now, talking specifically about an AWS developer Resume, apart from your name and personal details, the first section should be your work experience.
1. Work Experience
It would be best if you always started with relevant work experience, which will quickly draw your recruiter’s attention. Your resume should state the responsibilities you have taken and what you have learned 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 a 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 teams & management to understand the requirements & 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.
Some key factors in the above resume will not only give you an upper hand but will also impress your employer. Please take a note of the following pointers:
- Looking at the job description, you can tweak your experience likewise and mention those tools and skills that the organization requires.
- 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 experience with the same tool, you have that experience with another tool.
2. 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 EXAMPLES:
- Ability to understand Migration requirements and bridge the gaps
- Expertise in architecture blueprints and detailed documentation. Create a 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, and Code Pipeline, design the overall Virtual Private Cloud VPC environment, including server instances, storage instances, subnets, high availability zones, etc
3. Achievements & Hobbies
After this, the next section should be Achievements and Hobbies. Try not to mention too many achievements or hobbies, as they could distract your interviewer and cause him/her to miss the important ones. Mention a few that are relevant and with which you are confident.
Given that different companies will screen your resume, it is important to understand the industry requirements. Here are a few sample job descriptions that companies require.
Related Learning: AWS Interview Questions
JD by IBM For AWS Solutions Architect
JD by TCS for AWS IOT Architect
JD Brillio for AWS Architect
From the above JDs, 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 Master 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
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This Edureka 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.
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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 know 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
- Know how to implement and control the flow of data, to and from a service provider
- Capability to select the appropriate services based on computing, 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 we can actually build an AWS resume:
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A better understanding of these concepts can be obtained from the AWS Solutions Architect Training.
So this is it, guys. I hope this AWS resume blog has helped you figure out how to build an attractive and 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 you would make as an AWS professional.
If you have any questions, you can put them in the comments section below, and we will respond as soon as possible.