When I started looking for inspiration for my resume update, one of the things that came up was a resume built in Tableau. As a Tableau developer, it seems like a no-brainer and a great way to showcase my skills. The one thing that struck me after researching examples is that everything I looked at was gimmicky. It is not that they didn’t look good – they did. The issue was that they were not building a report about their work history; people used Tableau to make something cool but did not allow the viewer to “drill down.” As the personality type who takes things to their extreme, I set out to do it correctly.

I am an avid Google Sheets/Excel user, always looking for an excuse to use a spreadsheet to solve an automation challenge. My thesis for this resume rewrite was that I could build a tool allowing the user to input their work history, and viola – a Tableau report you could customize produced on your work history data. During my last resume beautification effort, I had set out to create a web page that would pull from a Google sheet, so I had already started the process.

Data Cleansing

The resume style lends itself to a denormalized data structure, so my learning curve followed a pretty simple process – I started copy-pasting. I found that the report became more and more flexible/dynamic as I normalized my resume data. The more I normalized my data, the harder it became to manage it – remembering what project you are trying to describe can be rough when you reduce them to numbers based on the order of events. Ultimately, I wrangled my data into a 3NF or Third Normal Form.

As I built the dashboards, I realized I needed something to quantify. The first thing that came to mind was the number of people reporting to me (aka direct hires), which is simple to quantify. After adding my plain hire field to the database (aka my multi-tabbed spreadsheet), I realized that, while I viewed my resume as a timeline – the data is not actually in a time format that can be reported on over a time scale.

Now that I have fully embraced the data structure – I started adding more attributes. I could tag projects and create drill-downs based on the industry. I developed a grading for each project based on the soft skills I used. These attributes added to the level of detail of the report, but nothing stood out as useable for “trend analysis.” This led me to add a measure for my reach, which I label “customers supported.” I settled on this term because I felt it was a legitimate measure of growth.