hresume-skill-brainstorm

<entry-title>hResume skills property brainstorm</entry-title>

Tagspace issue

When you review how skills are authored in resume they are equally expressed either as terms or narrative sentences. The following examples where taken from a small sample [1] of online resumes:

• Object development
• CSS
• C# developer with 5 years team commercial experience
• Quick to recognize problems and execute solutions
• English – Very good
• Speak, read and write English fluently

As Ciaran McNulty mentioned in the hResume issues page,” in reality authors end up linking to places like Wikipedia”. You are also unlikely to create a tagspace just to support the publishing of your resume. I think this is true whether you’re adding a resume to a blog or building a large resume hosting service.

On top of which tagspaces do not work well with the narrative style of expressing skills used by some authors. Although rel-tag can create interesting cross linkages it is no use if it cannot be practically used for the majority of use cases when authoring a human readable document.

I would suggest that a simple text property is used instead of the rel-tag. This would be a more practical solution, as below:

<p class=”skill”>Application development</p>
<p class=”skill”>C# developer with 5 years team commercial experience </p>

Separating language from skills

If you have read many resumes you will appreciate how varied the labelling of skills sections are. There is one common division that I think should be reflected in the schema, the separation of languages from other skills.

From a sample of 10,000 structured resume’s entered into one of our systems 42% entered a skill, 35.2% entered a language skill and 18.9% entered a professional skill. This system is based in Europe and has an international reach. Please remember that structured entry systems can encourage a bias that would not be seen in a sample of freeform resumes. Even the small sample [1] of 10 freeform resumes picked at random had 3 that listed language skills.

We could redesign ‘skills’ into two separate properties; ‘skills’ and’ language’ and use a common compound structure “competency” to describe both or we could use the type pattern to define the type of skill.

Using a competency structure

Application development > 
French
So the hResume spec would have two properties; ‘ skills’ and ‘language’ which would be of the type competency, just like the contact property in hResume is of the type hCard

Using a type pattern

        Application development 
         skill
 

        French - 
         language


I think that the type pattern would be very verbose with large lists of skills therefore I would suggest the creation of the competency structure.