Electrical Engineer
Resume Example

The electrical engineering industry’s many subfields include:

The electrical engineering industry offers a competitive median annual salary of $103,390. And because you only need a bachelor’s degree to start your engineering career, you’ll have plenty of competition during your job search.

Follow these four tips to configure an electrical engineer resume that highlights your most relevant engineering skills and gets you more interviews:

1. Emphasize your electrical engineering skills

Electrical engineers use many technology and software hard skills to accomplish their tasks. But soft skills such as communication skills and management skills are also important to your electrical engineering resume.

Here’s a list of relevant hard and soft skills to list on your resume:

• Software: Questa, Eclipse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio
• Coding: C/C++, MATLAB, and Python
• Tools: Oscilloscopes, digital multimeters, and function generators
• Attention to detail
• Interpersonal skills
• Math skills
• Up-to-date industry knowledge
• Time management
• Organizational skills

Companies that hire electrical engineers often use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter out candidates who don’t include job-specific keywords in their resumes. So the more skills-based keywords that you put in your engineering resume, the higher the chances you’ll be interviewed.

2. Grab the employer’s attention with a resume objective

Get the hiring manager interested in your application immediately by starting your resume with a catchy resume objective. To write a perfect resume objective:

• read the job ad and research the company to determine which of your skills and achievements are most likely to impress the hiring manager
• summarize those skills and achievements in a 2–3 sentence paragraph

This is an example of an electrical engineer resume objective that uses keywords from the job ad to catch the hiring manager’s attention:

Electrical Engineer with 7+ years of experience working with blue-chip companies in the consumer electronics industry, primarily focusing on implementing and debugging electro-mechanical systems. Possess excellent interpersonal abilities and a wide range of technical skills. Enjoy being part of a team, as well as managing, motivating, and training a productive team, and thrive in high-pressure and challenging working environments.

3. Quantify your engineering experience

You can improve your resume by quantifying your professional experience with data and examples. Here are three example work experience bullet points from an electrical engineer resume that use quantification to impress hiring managers:

• Oversee a 10-member team responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining electrical systems within budgets averaging $5 million
• Led development of an electrical system for a new webcam, overcoming budget and scale issues by designing a mini PCB that earned the company 2 new patents
• Train 2+ new employees annually, ensuring adherence to safety procedures and maintenance of high-quality service standards expected by management

Quantification is especially effective if you can show the amount of money you saved via negotiation skills, smart use of resources, discovering a new source of cheap materials, or developing new strategies to improve labor efficiency.

4. Write achievement-oriented, job-specific bullet points

Target your work experience bullet points at the electrical engineer job you’re applying for, but don’t just list your related job duties.

When you read the job description, you’ll find a list of generic electrical engineering tasks. To make your resume stand out, show the hiring manager that you’ve achieved important milestones while doing those tasks in your previous work experience.

Let’s say the job description indicates you need to diagnose malfunctioning systems and fix them. Here’s an example bullet point that shows how you can list relevant experience while also highlighting an important achievement:

• Diagnose and repair malfunctioning systems by using test equipment to identify and eliminate bugs within tight time frames, earning speed-related bonuses in 8 straight quarters