IT Resume Workshop

Step 6: Tailor for Roles

Tailoring is how you stop being “a general IT person” and start looking like the obvious pick for a specific role. You’re not rewriting your entire resume — you’re changing emphasis.

Principle

One resume cannot be optimized for everything. Pick a target role, then make your top half of page 1 reflect that role.

The “mirror, don’t copy” method

Job descriptions tell you what the company cares about. Your resume should mirror the same themes using your own real experience.

  1. Pick one target job posting.
  2. Highlight the top 8–12 technical keywords that show up repeatedly.
  3. Group those keywords into 3–5 themes (Cloud, Systems, Security, Automation, Networking).
  4. Adjust your resume so those themes show up in:
    • Skills section (Step 3)
    • Top bullets under your most recent role (Step 4)
    • Projects/Labs (Step 7)
  5. Remove or de-emphasize anything that doesn’t support the target role.

What changes when you target different roles

Help Desk / IT Support

  • Ticket volume, SLA, customer-facing communication
  • Common troubleshooting areas (M365, printers, networking basics)
  • Documentation/runbooks and repeatable fixes
  • Device setup, onboarding/offboarding

Sysadmin / Infrastructure

  • Identity (AD/Entra), GPO, DNS/DHCP, servers
  • Reliability: patching, backups, monitoring, incident response
  • Security improvements (MFA, CA, RBAC, hardening)
  • Automation (PowerShell) + reducing manual work

Cloud / Cloud Engineer

  • Azure services you’ve touched (compute, networking, identity, storage)
  • Infrastructure-as-code, automation, scripting
  • Security + governance (RBAC, policies, least privilege)
  • Deployments, migrations, reliability improvements

DevOps (if applicable)

  • CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, release automation
  • IaC (Terraform), configuration mgmt, containers
  • Observability: logs, metrics, alerts
  • Security patterns (secrets, least privilege, approvals)

Key idea

You’re not “adding experience.” You’re choosing which parts of your real experience to feature first.

Where tailoring shows up (high ROI edits)

  • Top of resume: Summary line(s) (optional) should match the target role.
  • Skills: reorder categories and tools so the most relevant come first.
  • Experience: reorder bullets so the most relevant are first under each job.
  • Projects/Labs: include 2–4 that directly support the role.

Action

  1. Pick one target job posting.
  2. Extract 8–12 keywords (tools + responsibilities).
  3. Update your Skills section to mirror those themes (Step 3).
  4. Move 2–3 of your most relevant bullets to the top of your most recent role (Step 4).
  5. Pick 2 Projects/Labs that support the role (Step 7).