Trust us when we tell you that after you get your first software engineer job, all your other job searches will be much easier.
Companies seem to want software engineers with experience for entry-level roles. But how do you get that experience without experience? It’s an infinite loop.
We’ve helped thousands of developers break into the industry, and these five entry-level software engineer resume templates and the following Q&A are a great place to get started on building your resume and making a cover letter.
What Matters To Recruiters: Your Skills & Experience
You have one goal with your resume, to convince the recruiter you know how to code and are able to learn to do it better. Your “skills” and “work experience” sections are the places to accomplish that goal.
The temptation for entry-level developers is to list any and every programming language and library they’ve ever heard of.
Bad idea: recruiters want to see that you’ve focused less on the specific tools and more about applying those tools to become a better developer.
9 Top Entry Level Software Engineer Skills
- Git
- Javascript (Angular)
- HTML/CSS
- SQL
- Python
- Java
- Unix
- OOP
- AWS
Sample Entry Level Software Engineer Work Experience
As a new software engineer, any relevant coding experience should be put on your resume.
Did you build a perosnal web app to track your runs? Do a coding project for class? Build a website for your club at school?
The goal with your experience is to convince the recruiter you’ll have an impact in the role they’re hiring for. Nothing does that better than numbers.
Here are a few samples:
- Assigned to e-commerce team, and participated in designing improved software using algorithms to match users to products, boosting sales by 16%
- Built a full-stack web app to allow users to simulate and visualize outcomes of poker hands against opponents of different play styles using open source cards.js on the front-end
- Using Selenium I built out a unit testing infrastructure for a client application that reduced the number of bugs reported by the client by 11% month over month
- Built internal tool using NodeJS and Pupeteer.js to automate QA and monitoring of donor-facing web app, which improved CTR by 3%
Top 5 Tips for Your Entry Level Software Engineer Resume
- Showcase your education
- As great as your teen jobs were, when you’re fresh out of school or a coding boot camp, your education might be your biggest asset! That’s okay and completely expected at this stage of your career. Really put it forward and include relevant programming classes you took as well.
- You need to have projects to showcase
- No getting around it, if you want a job as a programmer you need to show that you can program. You need to have some projects you can point to to say “I built that.” If you don’t have any yet, don’t stress! You can always start working on a project.
- The sections you can include
- If you have extra space on your resume, you can include a few extra sections. Hobbies and interests, a career objective, activities (like clubs and memberships). If you have a hobby relevant to the company/ developer role you’re applying to, even better.
- Too many skills is a big red flag
- I’ve seen software engineer resumes with 50 skills listed on them. Listing this many skills just screams “I’m not an expert in any of these so I’m playing a volume game.” Focus on the languages/ frameworks you know best.
- Non-relevant work experience
- People tend to feel sheepish about including non-relevant work experience on their developer resume. Showing you have work experience (even if not programming) is strongly preferred by employers to no work experience at all!
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I make my entry level software engineer resume ATS friendly?
- Make it easy to read for a human. The big, bad, scary ATS myth largely comes from companies trying to sell you resume software (we’re also trying to sell you our premium tools, too, but we’re honest about it—and our resume templates are ATS-friendly to boot). Focus on making it pleasurable to read for a human first and foremost.
- Should I include a link to my Github?
- If you got it, flaunt it! Your Github is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge and capabilities when you’re looking for your first developer job. What better way to showcase yourself than through your code?
- Should I include a career objective?
- In short, no. Only include a career objective if you’re going to customize it for every company you apply. Companies love to read about themselves, what can I say?
