Skip to main content

Telling Your Story

Figuring out how to tell your story is probably the most important part of marketing yourself. Once you've figured out your story, you'll want to find ways of incorporating it whenever you're communicating with a potential employer - your resume, your cover letter, your LinkedIn and GitHub, and in any job interviews.

If you're struggling, try brainstorming by asking yourself some of these questions:

  • What transferable skills will I bring from my old job when I become a developer?
  • What initially drew me to my previous career? What drew me to programming?
  • When I was a kid, what did I want to be when I grew up? Why?
  • What challenges did I face when learning to code, and how did I overcome them?
  • What are my strengths as a developer? How have I demonstrated these strengths in other areas of my life?

Note to Career Changers​

If you're a career changer, telling your story well is one of the keys to a successful job hunt. Your career transition probably makes sense to you, but it won’t be obvious to a hiring manager. Highlighting the common thread through your experiences will make this transition feel inevitable and make it feel like you were always meant to be a software engineer.

Describing Your Previous Experience​

When it comes to your resume, you might be tempted to remove all traces of your previous career when looking for a job in tech. I'd advise against this. Any experience you have is an asset - it all comes down to how you describe that experience.

When you talk about your previous experience, describe it through a tech lens in order to translate it for your audience of recruiters and hiring managers. In other words; focus on the transferable skills as much as you can; and if there were any technical aspects to your job, highlight them regardless of how significant a responsibility they were. Some examples:

  • At a previous job, I worked to create a handbook for the teachers in my program. On my resume, I described this as "writing documentation" for teachers in my program.
  • At the same job, I worked on researching and implementing CRM software for our organization. It wasn't a primary responsibility, but since it was technical I included it on my resume.
  • A career changer I spoke with once worked previously as a scientist - she was able to describe some of her previous research in terms of "A/B testing"
  • I've spoken with a number of career changers coming from client-facing roles who've been able to describe their experience in terms of meeting "acceptance criteria" from "stakeholders"
  • I've also spoken with career changers coming from jobs working on teams who've been able to describe their experience using Agile/Scrum terms like "daily standup" or "refinement" or "product owner."
tip

If you're struggling to think of your own examples, try looking at job postings and making note of words you frequently see describing responsibilities of your target job. Can you think of any ways to describe your previous experience using any of these terms?