I gained 3 years of experience in 30 seconds. Thanks Resume!

#career

Gained 3 years of experience in 30 seconds. Thanks Resume!

So this is a very weird blog post for me to write. On one hand, I’m describing how a few additions to my resume makes me significantly more desirable to employers because now I have experience from multiple projects. But to talk about that, I have to come to terms with the fact that for more than 5 years, I misrepresented my experience to my own detriment. Honestly, I feel I stalled my career growth for those 5 years.

I’m not sure if I want to admit that… Let me tell you the full story.

So I have two Bachelor’s Degrees from two different schools. One came from the now defunct Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Web Design and Interactive Media in 2012 and the other from Nova Southeastern University in Software Engineering in 2017. But if you looked at my resumes for the last 2 years, you would not have known much about my Art Institute experience.

The Web Design program at the Art Institute taught you what would be considered Front-End focused Full Stack Engineering today. We learned to create website designs, then take those designs and translate them into web pages. We learned HTML and CSS as one does and when things needed to be dynamic, we were taught raw JavaScript (no front-end frameworks), PHP and MySQL. During this time I took on several freelance projects, some because it was a part of the curriculum and others I came across on my own. I produced some interesting projects, one of which included designing a page for a comic book artist in Adobe Flash (remember that anyone?) which used XML to talk with a PHP back-end that connected to a MySQL database. After completing that project, I never spoke of it again until a couple of weeks ago. The project was completed in 2010.

I went back to school for Software Engineering because at the time I was having trouble finding a job in web design, I didn’t really like it and felt I needed a proper Computer Science degree. When I did, I more or less purged that part of my life from me. Forgot all the things I did and never spoke about them to anyone. Fast forward to about 2 weeks ago, I had someone reach out and critique my resume. They saw one freelance job I had on there and suggested I add more. To be quite honest, In my mind I was like “This is the only freelance work I ever did” so I shrugged my shoulders. Then I started to remember the stuff I did back at the Art Institute and wrote them down. Would be describing one of the projects and then was like “Oh yeah, I did that too!” By the time I was done, I had 3 extra years of experience I wasn’t talking about which included interesting projects for the time. Some of the projects really showed a lot of interesting skills as a Front-End Engineer and to be quite honest a UI/UX Designer too (don’t even think that term existed at the time).

To be honest, afterwards I was ecstatic. I showed the resume around and someone even had the gaul to call me a Senior Front-End Engineer (joy!). And then I thought about it… The first job I completed was in 2010. I freelanced for a couple of years afterwards on a few different projects. Even before I finished Nova, I had several years of potentially documentable experience I could have talked about… and it simply didn’t exist to me. Been calling myself a Junior for 3 years because I had just graduated from Nova and now that I really remember all of this experience…

It just feels… weird...