Since the letter about writing the perfect job title, some of you have been asking me on how to write the job title in resume for a career advancement.

Can I title myself with the new role I desire?

That would be deceptive. You have not earned that title yet.

But if you have the experiences and the skills required for the new role you can showcase it in the resume by associating yourself with the new title and the type of work that deserves the new title.

Here's how you are going to do it.

Assume you've been a Senior DevOps engineer for several years. You feel capable of taking up a lead role now. But there's no opportunity at the current workplace. So, you decide to move on.

You see many opportunities for Lead DevOps engineers in job boards. And you have the required skills and experiences.

You need a resume that can convince the ATS (Application Tracking System) as well as humans that you are capable of being a Lead DevOps engineer.

Convincing the ATS

You cannot write your title as Lead DevOps engineer in your resume yet. If you do, that would violate your honesty policy. But without mentioning the Lead DevOps engineer in the resume, an ATS will likely filter you out.

You can simply overcome this problem by including the term Lead DevOps engineer in the personal profile as below.

Keen to work as a Lead DevOps engineer mentoring junior DevOps engineers, and designing and implementing cloud infrastructure to meet business requirements.

This will convince most ATS that you are capable of being a Lead DevOps engineer.

Convincing the humans

Once you get past the ATS, you must convince the humans behind (recruiters, managers, etc.) that you are qualified to play the new role you desire.

You don't have to title yourself with the new role to do that. Instead in the experiences section, associate yourself with the type of work that deserves the new role.

But, where appropriate you can temporarily title yourself with the new role also.

Checkout these two examples of describing experiences for a senior DevOps engineer looking for a lead DevOps engineer role.

Tech Lead in the database migration project.

Played the lead role in migrating on-premise Kubernetes workloads to AWS.

Here's an example for a DevOps engineer to associate himself with the type of work of a senior DevOps engineer.

Designed cloud infra for xyz project considering business requirements and aligning to AWS well architected framework.

You see the point. It's about associating yourself with the new title via the type of work you do.

So the bottom line is if you are planning to switch jobs with a promotion, don't title yourself in the new title yet. Mention the title in the personal profile and associate yourself with the title via your work experiences.

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What we talked here is applicable for a career advancement but not necessarily for career switch. A career switch require significant effort for upskilling yourself and also involve lot more aspects than the job title.

I hope to touch those points in coming letters.

That's it for today.

Thanks for reading.
- Indika