The Resume Infographic Trend Continues

I’m aware that it’s trendy to create an infographic of your skills for use on your resume and recruiters may help propagate this trend because they see a resume with an infographic and think it’s been “designed” but hiring managers hate them. Primarily because they are often presented without enough context to be useful.

On the instance above labeled Software Skills, Adobe Creative Suite is listed at 90% — and my question is 90% of what? Sketch is 85% so the only information I’m getting here is that this person has nearly the same skills / time — I don’t know — with both Sketch and Adobe creative Suite?

But the comparison isn’t apt because there’s no frame of reference for what the percentage means. Additionally, the Adobe Creative Suite is vast. So to compare the single app Sketch, with the 30–40+ apps in the suite isn’t reasonable. But perhaps this person uses a vast number of plugin’s for Sketch so they are comparable?

Designers, it would better to list the applications you use and say what your workflow is and how you use the specific tools for specific tasks and when. Or contextualize your skills in a narrative.

For instance, I picked up Sketch a couple of years ago because the kids are all using it (I’m old) and I needed to understand how it was being used in modern design work. Recently, my team has been using the Craft and Plant plugins for workflow and Zeplin to export code. Among others. I’ve found that Sketch can replace Illustrator and Photoshop for much of my workflow but that I still use Illustrator for drawing because I find the drawing tools in Sketch, clunky. I use Photoshop for image manipulation then import those images into Sketch as needed.

Thanks for reading.