The Humble If Statement in your Resume Creation

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It’s often necessary to have more than one version of your resume. You might want to highlight different attributes of yourself for various different reasons. Perhaps for targeting different industries, or for different roles within a company. Sometimes you want to highlight certain skills, other times they may be superfluous. For whatever the reason, many of us end up with different versions of our resume (the worst of all of course being trying to track changes by saving different versions, aka:

resume_for_job_x_version_17_revised_final_final.docx

If you’re a developer then surely this kind of behavior is unacceptable and you should know better. Why treat your resume project any different than you would a coding project?

If you have a bunch of different versions and you need to make updates to all of them, it is so easy to make a mistake.

Keep your resume project DRY. How can we achieve this?

1. Track your changes

You know you can use git to track changes on any document right? So make a git repository for your resume and track your changes. Have a single copy of your resume and find smart ways to return to prior versions as you need to. But keep it DRY! It is then convenient to use Github to backup your work, you don’t have to use a public repo if you don’t want to.

2. if role x then show y

I’m probably the exception here, but my resume is written in Latex. I really just can’t stand the agony of begging WYSIWYG editors to format things as I would like (granted Latex has it’s own frustrations). It may well be partly nostalgia for days of writing Math(s) in Latex. None the less, its what I use. (Btw I use this awesome CV template from overleaf which I like a lot)

Latex writers, did you know Latex has an if statement? Why yes, it is a ugly as the rest of the language, but it does do the thing its meant to do : 

\newboolean{booleanVariable} 
\setboolean{booleanVariable}{true}

\ifthenelse{\boolean{booleanVariable}}{
  Show this if true
  }{
  show this if false
}

Using the if statement. I am able to prepare my resume for different situations whist keeping my resume project DRY.

You can keep this nice and tidy by having different files for different sections of your resume and importing them into your project like this:

\newboolean{certainRoleType} 
\setboolean{certainRoleType}{true}
...
\begin{document}

\ifthenelse{\boolean{certainRoleType}}{
  \import{\sectiondir}{section1_for_that_role.tex}
  }{
  \import{\sectiondir}{section1_for_the_other_role.tex}
}

But Microsoft Word doesn’t have an If statement, and I’m not a weird Latex loving masochist like you

Some of you probably

….I hear you cry.

I think the principal is still valid for other technologies. You could probably knock up a quick little python project for preparing a Microsoft Word Resume.

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