I see a lot of programming beginners doing webdev-projects building skill bars. When I was starting and done programming for about one or two years...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Rating your own skill this precisely is an invitation to the dunning-kruger effect. You will rarely know how much you're missing until you're getting very close to really mastering something.
And what does the end of a progress bar even represent?
Proficiency? Then you shouldn't have anything on your resume that's not a full bar anyway. There's no point in advertising that you've heard of a technology but can't even reliably work with it on your own.
Or is it mastery? Then how can anybody trust your evaluation of your own skills? Once again, this metric is very susceptible to the dunning-kruger effect. The further you are from mastering a skill, the less reliably you can tell what's left for you to learn.
Would it be fair to use keywords like; 'beginner', 'intermediate', 'expert' and so on instead? At least that wouldn't make it seem like you know everything, but tells the reader something about what level you consider yourself to be in.
I personally would prefer such keywords as description.
@darkwiiplayer I completely agree with you on this one. Some of my friends barely know HTML/CSS and say that they know Frontend Dev. They even rate themselves as 4/5 often on these bars.
While many seniors I see often rate themselves as a 2/5 or at max a 3/5.
I completely agree with you.
I don’t think the skill bar is the problem. It’s the dishonesty that often follow them. But I will say, they can be useful in a digital-only setting.
It’s not that hard to write a couple lines of text presenting a job experience as more significant than it actually was.
Assume that I am looking at 2 resumes; both use skill bars. One uses a 5-star system, and one uses a 10-pip system. Ok, so each star is worth 2 pips.
The 5-star candidate has 4 years of experience at two companies that do extensive front-end work.
They rated themselves a 3 on HTML, a 2 on CSS, and a 4 on JS.
The 10-pip candidate has done a 6-month internship, and a 3-month bootcamp, and are looking to get their first role.
They rated themselves a 7 on HTML, a 5 on CSS and a 9 on JS.
Is it the 90th percentile of all people on the globe who are familiar with JS?
Is it the 90th percentile of the people in the intern's class / work-placement who are familiar with JS?
Is it the 90th percentile of the intern's relative perception of their own skills... where they have exactly one 10/10 (gymnastics), and every other skill is relative to their own perceived mastery, compared to their mastery of gymnastics... (which raises a new question... if they are a 10/10 in gymnastics, as it represents their strongest skill, how does their strongest skill relate to the strongest people in that discipline? How do they match up versus Simone Biles, because their 10/10 might only be a 2, compared to her... which means that their other skills must only be worse from there).
It all goes back to looking at those two resumes a 5-star and a 10-pip. Which one do you call for an interview?
The point of the scale is to see how they rate their own fluency against their actual experience. There is no baseline or litmus to base it against. It doesn't matter what scale the other guy is using at all.
It's a way to frame the conversation. And not a means for doing flat comparisons between candidates.
I understand that is the intent of the person who is putting it on the resume. That makes complete sense, and if people decide they want it for the aesthetic or the novelty, regardless, who am I to say no?
Instead, I am asking how a hiring manager, a talent scout, et cetera, will be able to tell all of the relevant scores apart, relative to one another, if you have 3 people with score bars, and 0 of those people provide reference points for their scoring systems, and 0 of those people provide justification for the scores they have chosen, and you don't have enough time in the day to review all GitHub profiles to choose who to move forward with, and rather, review GitHub in a secondary screening process.
A few, simple words would remove ambiguity in the eyes of the scout, and help that process along.
That's why I wrote this blog post. Of course I see why someone put this on their resume. I did it too. It looks nice and of course I would never say: Never do this! There are use cases and employers who prefer graphics and visual representations of the skills on resumes. I'm just very interested in points why you should and why you shouldn't. In my opinion it would be the best solution just to provide a GitHub link to show what you are able to do and work with, of course 😂
That's not always possible I know.
I'm not an employer and it would be very interesting what the opinions of real team managers are.
Of course you can also lie without using skill bars, but I think the system of scoring yourself leads into bigger temptation.
And btw I also think they're looking quite nice on a webpage, so just to practice a bit web-development they are a good project.
While I completely agree that the figures are somewhat meaningless, I think it does help visualise which areas a candidates feels are their relative strengths and weaknesses are. For example:
PHP: 2/10
JavaScript: 7/10
HTML: 8/10
CSS: 8/10
Their last job title may have been as a “Full-stack web developer” but they’re clearly more front-end focused. Whether it’s visually through info graphics or through words they’ll tell you the same thing.
This is exactly why skill bars are great in tech and marketing. It helps the hiring person to know where the candidates perceived strengths are.
It helps me guide the interview to see how much or little they have bullshitted. :)
I also like them because they are succinct and to the point.
I also don’t see them as “mastery of said skill” more of a “junior vs senior” rating.
I agree, however, I was just advised 2 days ago by a big wig at Adobe, who has interviewed 700+ people, who is mentoring me and took a red pen to my resume to keep the self-rating stars on my skills section. I even asked him directly if it was ridiculous. He said keep it.
Okay. This is very interesting. Do you know why he wants you to keep it? I'm very interested in his points.
His advice may be particular to my case, I'm wanting to get back into tech after a rough go at it 2 years ago. He wants me to keep this because "everybody's doing it" and best for me to fit in at this time. He said after a few successful years in tech, I could dare to be more bold with my style choices and breaking from current norms.
Skill bars are a HUGE trend in resumes. Personally I like the way it looks (pretty colors, some going up or down or left or right) BUT it is a big no-no. Did the American Bar Assoc. give those bars? Did the Alcohol Licensing Board tell you that Bars are this long? I don't get it.
I don't really get the point of skill bars and rating your own skills using a score.
It's a vague measurement and often leads to misrepresentation.
Couldn't agree more. I've noticed that in a lot of resume templates, you'll find the Skills section in this format and it really doesn't make any sense.
I think you could expand more on the solutions though, like providing examples from resumes and personal developer websites as well.
I just wanted to point at other possible ways to show your skills in the last paragraph, but I agree that a example picture would have fit good in there.
I agree, but for a different reason. Resumé should be about pointing out your strengths. Using these rating bars is merely pointing out your weaknesses. Personally, I don’t include any skill/language/framework on my resumé unless I feel confident to undertake a big project with it.
The main downside of skill bars is readability.
How should I know what a full skill bar means? Everybody have their own interpretations.
But to some of this articles point, especially "Equal difficulty" and "subjective and unreliable", the solution didn't help much.
From my experience with many HRs and interviews, skill bar is used to attract HR who needs to filter lots of candidates from a pile of resumes. In this case, skill bar does have its strength, it's eye catching.
TBH, engineers don't like skill bars, because it tells too few informations (so as word like "proficient"). That's when experience and side project and some github link comes in. These are the real content engineers care about.
In short: Skill bars + level of skill in words for HR / ATS, real code or project content for engineers.
I have been ask how do you rate your skill from 1 to 10 in the interview, guest what I said
Step 1: Start a discussion with your future employer about their interview questions
😂
I think we should show skills in our Resume, so that recruiters any view and shortlist.
That's very insightful, thanks for sharing
Every time I see a candidate with a "5/5" that misses a question make me think he lied on his resume.
Same as you, I splitted my skills into 3 categories: familiar, experiemented and proficient.
I think some people and also me in the past think they have to rate their skills somehow in a resume. Skill bars seem nearly perfect for this. When creating them the compulsion to make at least one bar 100 percent is strong, whether or not it makes sense or even can be true.
Or just add a visually subtle explanation line of the rating scale? .... “100% equals proficient", "5/5 represents numerous projects completion using this tool“, etc
By doing this the problem of applying the same scale on different types of skill still exists. In my opinion it makes more sense just to list the skills and explain it in the same way you done it.
For example:
etc.
Just my opinion
But I think by doing it like you explained you don't get completely rid of the problems occurring by using a skill bar presentation.
ATS has also tough time reading those. Most of the ATS ignores it
I see this alot when reviewing resumes and I've never thought to myself that this is a useful addition. I'd prefer to see a list of skills and an honest overview of how much involvement the candidate has had with them. The rest can be chatted about in the interview.