How to turn project experience from "superficial" to "valuable"

Many people write project experience resumes with rich content but lack value. This article analyzes common project experience writing problems, such as low project difficulty and insufficient thinking depth, and gives two strategies to improve: reflect the difficulty and difficulty of the project, and deeply explain the purpose and design ideas of the project. Recommended for people in various industries who need to adjust their resumes.

Many people's resumes have one thing in common, which is that they are a diary.

Especially in the project experience part, it seems that there is a lot of content written, but if you look closely, the content is nothing more than what was done first and what was done next. Basically, it just talks about what was done in chronological order.

This situation is very common. How should I modify such a resume?

1. Manifestation of the problem

For a data analyst with only one or two years of experience, it is indeed difficult for him to have the opportunity to get involved in any serious projects.

In daily work, 70 to 80 percent of the time is spent on requirements, bottom-level programming, and data collection. Even if some analysis of requirements is done, it seems difficult to connect with the so-called "project".

However, there is another project experience that is required in the resume template, so they can only write down what they have done in order.

It is usually written like this, taking data report construction as an example:

In order to meet the company's needs for monitoring business and measuring performance, a data report construction project was launched. During the project, data report tools suitable for the company's business were studied and recommended, the structure and layout of the data report were designed, and finally the report code was written to automatically generate data reports.

The establishment of data reporting is the basic work of data analysts. The work content is relatively standardized and it is indeed difficult to write well.

How to extract the highlights?

2. Situation reflected

The project experience is written as a running account, which reflects two problems :

1. The project is not difficult: The project is not difficult and no difficulties were encountered.
2. Lack of deep thinking: The work content is assigned, and you don’t think deeply about the project itself.

2.1 The project is not difficult

In a project, you can do what you want first and what you want next in chronological order, and advance step by step until the final project is completed. This shows that all the early plans have been realized. There were no unexpected events in the process, which shows that the project itself is not difficult.

So even though the project on your resume was eventually completed, it may just be your luck that you encountered a project background with abundant resources in all aspects. If you encounter a situation where some projects are short of resources, there may be problems.

So this project experience only means that you have done it before, not that you will do it again.

2.2 Lack of depth in thinking

If you don't think deeply enough about the project, then you can only say what you did, but not why you did it.

You only know what to do, which shows that the biggest credit for the success of this project actually goes to your supervisor, because the tasks assigned to you by your supervisor are relatively reasonable.

You are just an executor in this project. If you were asked to create a new report in a different scenario, you might not be able to complete it.

There is such a story: In a large factory, there is a very important machine. One day, the machine broke down and could not work properly. Even though many repairmen were invited, they could not solve the problem. Finally, they found the most famous mechanic in the country. The mechanic looked around and finally found a position. He knocked it and the machine worked properly. The boss was very happy and asked excitedly: "You only used one hammer to solve the problem. How much is the repair fee? I will pay you right away." The repairman replied: "It will cost 10,000 yuan." The boss was very surprised and said: "You just knocked it once, but it costs 10,000 US dollars?" The repairman explained: "Knocking a hammer is only worth one dollar, but knowing where to knock is worth 9,999 US dollars."

If your thinking is not deep, your work is just about hitting the hammer, but what is truly valuable is knowing why you hit it that way.

Therefore, the lack of in-depth project experience only means that you have done it, not that you know how to do it.

3. Solutions to the Problem

If you want to make a simple experience more effective, you need to strengthen two aspects.

Solution 1: Point out the difficulties

Generally, there will be some difficulties in project implementation, but some people don’t write them on their resumes or they are not reflected in the interview process.

During project implementation, common types of difficulties include :

• Time is tight and the task cannot be completed as planned
• Lack of necessary resources, such as manpower, technology, funds, etc.
• The project goals are unclear and requirements change frequently.
• There are problems with communication and collaboration between project members
• Technical problems that require research and experimentation with new solutions

You can think back to your own project experience, whether there is such a problem? Then simply include a sentence in your resume.

For example, due to the tight project schedule, the construction of the entire reporting system was divided into three steps. The first phase completed the core operating indicator monitoring dashboard, the second phase completed the flow-related detailed reports, and the third phase completed other detailed reports. If you write like this, the interviewer will naturally ask: Why were these three phases divided at the time? Why does flow have a higher priority than other detailed reports? You can prepare this answer in advance. Then the quality of this interview will give people a deeper impression than your original bland account.

Solution 2: Add depth

General project experience is a log. To add depth, you must know both the results and the reasons behind them.

If you want to talk about the depth of a project like report construction, you generally need to know the following questions:

1. Why these indicators?
2. Why these reports?
3. Why is it in this order?
4. Why this kind of chart?

(1) Why these indicators?

Many people have not thought deeply about why these indicators are used. There are many mature indicator systems on the Internet. Some people are used to directly applying them. This method is indeed very efficient, but for interviews, this approach is definitely not the best answer.

The design of indicators must first be based on the characteristics of the company's business. No two companies' businesses are exactly the same.

The same is true for sales conversion business. Virtual goods do not need to build a supply indicator system, but physical e-commerce needs supply-side indicators. The same is true for APP operation. When looking at the user scale of high-frequency APPs, dau is generally used. But for some relatively low-frequency APPs, wau or mau is mainly used.

Indicators do not fall from the sky. You need to sort out the necessary indicators based on the characteristics of your company's business.

(2) Why these reports?

The answer to this question is the purpose of your report design. For example, the first report is for senior management to see, and only the core operating results are placed on it. This report refines the core indicators so that senior management will not be distracted by too many indicators, while focusing on the core business progress.

The five tables are for the traffic end, marketing end, and supply end. The report contains the KPI progress of the person in charge of each business line and detailed data by dimension. Finally, there are three tables for daily monitoring of specific operational actions, monitoring the three most important business strategies at present, mainly for the operations staff who are responsible for specific execution. In this way, the logic of your report is very clear.

(3) Why is it in this order?

The design of reports is not a simple stacking. The problem that many report system constructions will eventually encounter is that the reports are very complete, but the users can't find them at all. If the design is appropriate, then a table can show a lot of information.

For example, you can say that this is a report I show to my traffic colleagues. At the top, I will put the KPI progress of the traffic end, in the middle is the traffic trend of different channels, and at the bottom is the detailed data of each process indicator of the traffic.

The reason for this design is that when operations staff look at this table, they generally look at the first table first to track the target progress. If the KPI progress in the first table meets expectations, then there is no need to look at the following table. If the KPI progress is behind schedule, then look at the second table to see which channel is behind schedule. After confirming which channel, look at the third table to see which process indicator of this channel has a problem.

The order in which reports are designed reflects the order of analysis and also reflects your understanding of the business.

(4) Why is this kind of chart?

This question is a little more detailed.

General BI tools support the display of multiple charts, such as line charts, bar charts, pie charts, detailed tables, etc. So which form should be chosen for a report? This is also part of your in-depth thinking. I won't go into this part in depth.

4 Summary

Today's article sorted out a simple project experience such as the construction of a reporting system. If you want to improve the value of project experience, you must start with the depth of thinking and the difficulty of the project.

Author: Jason

Source: WeChat public account "Sanyuan Variance (ID: sanyuanfangcha)"