How To Account for Years of Experience in Each Skill Area?

Hi Liz,

I have held several jobs where I have performed all tasks in the software life
cycle.

To keep it simple, let's say I have had a job for five years that involved
analyzing requirements, designing a system or a bug fix (sometimes formally
but often informally), coding the programs (often using multiple languages
and tools), testing and further tweaking the product, implementing the
solution in the production system, and documenting the changes.

Can I say I have five years worth of experience in each of these tasks/tools
used, or do I need to think "well I spent maybe three months analyzing, two
and a half years coding, a year and a half coding and testing and integrating
changes, but already considered the coding part earlier, a month plus a few
days here and there implementing the changes ..." ... and you get the
picture. I could break down my experience in the tool sets (Oracle,
programming and scripting languages, HTML vs. XHTML vs. CSS vs. XML, etc.) in
a similar fashion.

Is five years of coding languages A, B, and C 60% of the time worth five years
or three - and presumably one year each language?

Is five years of analyzing requirements 20% of the time worth five years or
just one?

Yikes! As you can see this really gets complicated when one has worked with
multiple tool sets on multiple jobs!

Is there some way I can keep it simple yet honest about how many years and
months I have spent doing these tasks and using the tools involved?

Thanks in advance, Liz, I greatly enjoy reading your advice to members of this
group!



Dear Tom,

This is a great question, and this is the first time I've been asked it - it's a perfect engineer or IT person's question, because a lot of folks with less analytical perspectives wouldn't even stop to think about this issue, I imagine.

First off, I wouldn't split up the skills on your resume and attach a timeframe to each one. The fewer lists and tables on your resume, the better. Of course, somewhere you'll need to list your technical cred items, but telling stories (like the wonderful story you've just shared with us - that is, a narrative version of how you got a product from requirements to launch) is much stronger. That being said, some companies will ask you (in an online application form, or in an interview) exactly how much time you've spent doing X, Y and Z.

You will tie yourself into knots trying to quantify the exact amount of time you've spent in each of these arenas, and the thing is, if you do that even somewhat accurately you'll end up underselling your skills. We're entitled to credit for analysis time when we're coding and vice versa, just to use one example. Most people think about their skills-deployment time this way:

"How long have I been coding, even though I haven't spent all of my time on any job coding? Well, heck, I guess I've been coding for about twelve years, along with the other things I've been doing. Voila! I've been coding for twelve years."

It's the same way with particular languages, tools, applications and protocols. The question is "When did I touch this thing for the first time? 1990? That's nineteen years ago. If I've been using it since then, even if not continuously, I've got 19 years of experience with it ['it' in this case being Lego Mindstorm]."

Cheers! Liz
p.s. Thanks for your kind words.
p.p.s. I'm not sure there was Lego Mindstorm in 1990.