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Initial review and minor polish.
=How To Put Open Source Experience On Your Resumé=
This document explains recommends best practice for putting open source experience on your resumé. It is primarily aimed at college students or people who have not yet had a first job in softwareand who are focused on computer programming.
If you are a college studentwithout extensive Open Source experience, your primary "experience" is education. So list it first and prominently, and only then list open source or other experience. Most In the absence of other experience, employers are looking for good educational pedigree first. (Sad and terrible perhaps, but true.)
Having said that, it's good to participate in free and open source development because (among many other reasons) it will lead to further opportunities. Experience starts to trump college the older you get. After your first job or two, people care much less about your college grades. (Hopefully this will give you a sense of perspective about them.)
# acquired <b>skills</b> using a set of tools;
# <b>experience</b> of real-world development;
# real work you can point to, and get <b>references</b> for;# a public record of your ability to work as part of a distributed team.
==Skills==
The way you present your skills and yourself to recruiters and HR staff is not necessarily the way you'd present them to your peers. You may end up saying things that would sound arrogant, weird or anally overly precise in other contexts. That's OK.
Here are some skills you may well have picked up while working on open source which you may not have thought of adding:
* Experienced at talking to people from different countries and cultures
* Able to persuade people to do what you want when they don't have Ability towork with and motivate volunteers
* Focus on writing real-world, long-term-maintainable software
* Experience working as a part of a globally distributed team
==Experience==
There are things you can do even while you are contributing to increase the usefulness of your contribution in helping you get a job. For example, make sure your contribution is documented somewhere so you can point potential employers, HR people, or technical reviewers to a full description of what you did. Then later you can say "I QAed 7 packages according to these guidelines", and then point to the guidelines. You get bonus points for documenting your own processes and work because it shows you can do documentation.
Most Open Source projects don't give people job titles. However, a job title is just a two or three word summary of what your job is. So it may be worth discussing with the project lead what appropriate and accurate title you could use when listing your experience on that project. "Contributor" sounds like you just hung out ("I fixed a typo in the documentation - that's a contribution"). Avoid In some cases, you may wish to avoid the word "Volunteer" entirely. Something like "QA EngineerQuality Assurance Technician" is better. Suggest a title to the project lead, and see what he says. Position the title so it's credible and relevant to the job you are applying for.
* Contributed N hours of testing...
* QAed N packages for release X...
* Project Foo is used by 500,000 software developers and organizations, such as Sun and IBM (who has used Foo as the base of their Foo+Bar project.)
These are quantifiable things that can give you a college student has done, which is more than you usually seesignificant edge over others who can only list educational credentials. This is much better than talking about "the cool lab project I did" which no-one can look at.
You should have a "Top Accomplishment" section for each position held, which tells a short story about something great that you did in that position. E.g. explain that you tracked down and fixed a critical bug which was blocking a release, and give a link to the bug report itself.
==References==
If you've already done software work well, with peer accolades, that will make companies more comfortable hiring you than an untested person. Most project leads will be happy to provide a reference or endorsement, assuming your work has been good. However, full references on resumés are actually clutter. If you are obtaining endorsements or references, it's much better to get them put into a business social networking tool like [http://linkedin.com LinkedIn ] or [http://xing.com Xing]. You can then reuse them the references in the future, and they are automatically authenticatedpotential employers can validate the credibility of your references. In the resumé itself, you should instead reference the relevant website, and use the space to excite the potential employer with descriptions of what you actually did.
==The Hiring Process==
If they find you've written the truth and they like what you've written, your name may be put forward for interview. The goal of your resumé is to persuade the company to interview you. Don't put anything on it which doesn't help achieve that.
==Interviews==
Your first interview will typically be by phone. You will be asked about everything you list on the CV, so don't over-inflate your experience. Be ready to talk about areas of strength, and why you are passionate about those areas. Passion is important. Companies would rather hire someone who loves testing and breaking things rather than someone who is laid back about itseems to be just looking for a paycheck.
An interview is just as much about you trying to work out whether this opportunity/job/career path is for you, as it is for them a potential employer to assess you. So come prepared with questions about the work and the environment so you know if and when you accept, you'll be doing something you are excited about. Useful questions to ask:
* What is your company's view on employers contributing to OSS? Is it done on my own time or company time?
* Will continuing to contribute to OSS during employment cause a problem?
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<small>Document by Gervase Markhamwith edits by Zak Greant, with thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for most of the ideas and and Zak Greant for kicking things off.</small>