Thanks to everyone for your honest and thoughtful input! I'll kill several posts with one stone here, since my post count is already ridiculous, and I can't catch Mark or Tony anyway.

-> ricin

Mine doesn't have one.

Yes, I see that. And, I'll definitely say that with a "Summary" section, the Objective section seems a lot less important. I'll go that route instead. I just couldn't see stripping the Objective section off of mine without having some kind of "intro" type material to start it off... Starting right off with Education or Experience or whatever just doesn't seem natural enough.

-> Mach

I'd have to say leave off the objective also and include an objective or reasons you're applying in a cover letter. In place of an objective, you can include a personal summary but its not necessary. I would suggest tailoring your skills section to match the job that you are applying for. Cut down on the skills listed and explain exactly how proficient you are with a relevant technology that is needed for the job. If you are applying for a specific job, play up any relevant skills in your experience section also.

I also agree with customizing the resume for the job... But this is my first cut at getting my boilerplate resume together... As jobs come up that pique my interest, I'll press, change, and re-arrange things such that they're customized for those types of jobs. One job that jumped out at me deals with Linux, Apache, Perl type stuff, so I'll shuffle those to the head of the "skills" section and focus more on my Perl work, even though that's definitely a minority of what I do at Vanguard these days.

I won't cut and paste the other suggestions, but I agree with all of them... Though I will say that finding numbers to back things up may be difficult in many cases.. To tell you the truth, if someone told me anything they did led to a 5% decrease in defects, I'd ask them to prove that it was *their* actions that did it, and not someone else, or pure luck, or the winds of change.... It's also SO easy to cook the books with defect rates, because everyone's idea of what constitutes a defect versus a new feature request differs, and I could very easily "cut in half" my software's defect rate by combining software change requests that seem related in some way... Too much wiggle room, y'know? The whole "bug vs. feature" discussion.

Oh, and my GPA for my Masters program was a 3.81... But I'd rather not put it on my resume because then I'd be expected to put down my undergrad GPA, which was far less stellar. I don't have a problem with them asking it in an interview, of course, but just putting my graduate GPA would, in my opinion, make me look like I'm hiding my earlier grades. And yes, I did finish while working fulltime at Vanguard, but how should I put that into words in a resume?

-> peter

Oh, and just in case you're applying for a job with a typography geek, never use underlines in typeset text, which includes Web pages and Word documents. Underlining is an ugly workaround way of indicating italicisation on typewriters which don't have italic characters.

Hmm.. Okay, underlines are out. I tried to use them sparingly just to visually offset the dates, but I guess I can find a better way to do that with whitespace or bold or something.

If you're applying for a job somewhere where no-one's heard of refactoring, be worried. It means they haven't looked in the software engineering section of a bookshop for five years or more.

Yeah. I am going to leave the refactoring bit in, I think it's an important facet of what I've done in this job.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who's contributed, and especially those who've posted or sent me links to their own resumes to cheat from. I think between the suggestions here, the examples you guys have, and a little bit of soul-searching, I can come up with something a little more "catchy" than the drab resume I have right now. I *sincerely* appreciate your help.