The difficulty is that the candidate for a position or the IT professional seeking to transition into a career as a consultant is that they need to craft a resume which conveys their qualifications to a prospective employer or client in terms everyone understands: results. When writing resumes for IT jobs or programmer jobs or to present to prospective clients to secure projects as a consultant, people who have spent their professional lives in software careers and other technically oriented work now have to decide how best to present these results to people who often don't understand the intricacies of their work.
What these job seekers are often advised to do is to go ahead and list the metrics of their most important achievements over the course of their career, whether or not their audience will necessarily understand all of the finer points. Of course, there is often the problem that these results can be difficult to quantify; when this is the case, it's best to try to provide one's best estimate of these achievements.
Job seekers in the IT field are well advised to come up with ways to not only express their results on their resumes but also to explain them verbally when speaking with prospective clients and/or employers. Having references lined up who can attest to the results of these specific achievements is a near-essential part of the process. This is particularly the case for consultants, whose work often consists of working on only one phase of a large project and neither client nor consultant may be precisely sure of the final results of their work on these projects.
For IT professionals looking for new software careers and other positions in the professional services sector, it may be necessary to refocus their resume just as they are refocusing their search for IT jobs. This is one of those times when the objective on a resume becomes vitally important and should be developed carefully to fit the sort of future career path which candidates understand.
Rather than listing every single project from every one of the programmer jobs or other positions they have held throughout their career, newly minted IT consultants and other IT professionals interested in new roles which involve closer client side contact should decide on a single area to emphasize. By narrowing down the focus of their resumes, it is easier to determine metrics for results and to choose the very best of their achievements to arrive at an end product which is concise and does an effective job of selling the candidate's core competencies in their target career path.
