This AI Resume Goes Way Back In Time: When AI Was Hot, Before AI Winter

AI Summer 2017

AI used to be in. Then some marketeer or writer somewhere said it was out due to AI Winter. AI Winter is when the previous AI bubble burst. Scientists say it happened approximately 10 minutes after I received my AI diploma. Now AI is back. And so is my resume. Just in time before the next AI Winter storm hits.

I have two versions: Short and long. A one-page resume is called knowledge. My one-page resume is my elevator speech: I designed it for the busy executive or recruiter who only has time to read one page. To keep it simple and consistent, I also redesigned it to be the first page in my longer resume. The inspiration for my one-pager came from Steve Jobs and The Best Shortest Resume Ever:

Objective: I’m looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that “vision thing” and I’m not afraid to start from the beginning. Skills: That “vision thing,” public speaking, motivating teams, and helping to create really amazing products. -- Steve Jobs’ résumé, a placeholder ad to promote iTools, on me.com, January 5, 2000

My other resume is six pages long. That’s called experience. My kids are worried my resume is so long that it will break the Internet. Everyone says no one is going to read all that. And they won’t have to: I designed this resume as a master file of resume sections or parts. Depending on the company, client, or project, I can remove content sections that are not applicable. This longer resume is also designed for machine search. Google doesn’t care how many pages or words my resume has — Google will eat it up and spit it out whenever a recruiter is looking for someone exactly me. 

I am not certain, but when recruiters ask me to send them a copy of my resume, I am pretty confident they will request the longer one. I think it’ll be 80/20. We’ll see. What do you think? Will recruiters really want to see a one-page resume? I don’t think so, but I am not a recruiter.

Expert Advice on Writing a One-Page Resume from an AI Guy

So how do you take a career dedicated to knowledge, condense everything you know, and boil it down to one page? How do you summarize your unique experience, strengths, and capabilities on one page? And then make it understandable to a recruiter who may not be familiar with your domain of expertise? How do you make your resume stand out from the crowd? I think Roger Schank said it best:

There are two aspects of intelligence [that] are critical... One is to have something to say, to know something worth telling, and the other is to be able to determine others' needs and abilities well enough to know what is worth telling them. " Tell me a Story, by Robert Schank, Macmillan Press (1990)

The best resumes are not about what you know. They are about knowing what your ideal companies, hiring managers and recruiters really need. They are about knowing their needs so well that you know precisely what is worth telling them. Resumes are about their needs not your experience. That’s the true mark of knowledge, experience, expertise, judgment, and wisdom.

I don’t have all that wisdom stuff, and I definitely don’t have a great resume. But it is long! Even resumes are bigger in Texas.

AI Winter 1988

My wife doesn’t want to hear this, but my new long-form resume goes way back to high school. I know that sounds stupid. Believe me, it didn’t make sense to me either, until I chatted with an awesome recruiter friend on LinkedIn last week. Adding high school experience totally makes sense to me now. Why? Three reasons. 

First, I have experience in many industries. That’s called consulting. Take healthcare for example. I know something about healthcare insurance, having consulted Aetna a few years ago on a decision modeling modernization project. I also know something about medical informatics and clinical information systems. That was a long time ago but If I leave that job experience off my resume I knock out four years of valuable industry experience that HR recruiters would love to see on a resume. Strike one.

Second, I was coding SQL, SPSS, and learning about analytics. SPSS and analytics are two of the new flavors of the day in AI machine learning hype-land. I was doing analytics and data analysis on Operating Room visits and hospital stays at the University of Miami School of Medicine/Jackson Memorial Hospital. Every time a surgery started we knew it because the dot matrix printer would spit out data in real-time, as soon as the patient entered the OR. The printout was the system of record of the data. We knew peak times for ER visits so nurses and doctors could be scheduled and so OR room usage could be optimized. We could have counted how many medical supplies were used and maybe even predicted how many supplies to reorder when. We plotted fancy color graphs using SPSS on a Tektronix plotter. If my online resume doesn’t go back that far and list that experience then SPSS and analytics disappears from my resume. Recruiters with opportunities in healthcare or pharma never find me because that knowledge is missing. Strike two.

Third, I was a DBA using INGRES. Before DB2 even existed. When a recruiter or interviewer asks where I earned the DBA cred on my resume I say UM/JMH. If that isn’t on my resume that could be a red flag to some recruiters, especially if they have Youth and Inexperience on their side. Strike three.

Past is Prologue

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905

Programming at UM/JMH in high school was a great job. I was programming on a DEC VAX/VMS. (Years later, at Mobil Oil, I joined the executive team for a trip to DEC’s AI Headquarters in Boston. But that’s another story.) Occasionally, I would sneak into the research lab in the other building and use the Xerox Star — the one with the GUI screen, mouse, network, and laser printer. That’s the machine Steve Jobs saw on his Apple tour of Xerox when he got the idea for Lisa. Lisa is the mother of the Mac and grandmother of the phone that you are reading this on. That research lab experience laid the foundation for my career in IT and business. We had a Lisa and the first Mac. The older genius interns in the lab taught us how Mac coding worked and educated us on the who, what, where, when, why, and how to do event-driven programming and object-oriented programming. (I had authorization, badge, and key, to get in that Xerox Star lab, btw.) 

This job was also a public school internship program. Where else could a high-school kid get that kind of bleeding-edge experience back then, and get paid for it! Do public schools even offer high school internship programs like Miami-Dade County Public Schools Community Laboratory Research Program anymore? They should, don’t you think? 

So, there it is. My AI resume goes way back in time: When AI Was Hot, Before AI Winter.

(shameless plug: If you’d like to check it out, point your browser to My Resume)