The SG Tableau User Group just wrapped up it’s October virtual livestream event, which you can now watch on YouTube here. It was a great session that focussed on using Tableau to build clear and effective CVs and resumes. Below you will find a summary of the different sections covered along with their Livestream timestamps URLs in the title headers to make it easier for you to watch them.
Jia’s Tableau CV tips
Jia show us his Tableau Public CV and broke down how he made the main parts of it. He covered how to:
- Structure the underlying data that feeds the Tableau CV
- Make rounded bar charts
- Show your career history with an innovative way using a semi-circle timeline
- Use Custom Shapes to create clickable ‘contact me’ buttons for email, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
- Think about the dimensions of your dashboard CV i.e. A4 for easy printing
It was clearly presented and had lots of cool techniques that can hopefully inspire people to make or improve their CVs using Tableau. He even shared his Tableau Public CV for you to download and backwards engineer the techniques used.
Sarah’s Tableau CV & tips
Sarah shared her Tableau Public CV too, which was clear, concise and had lots of user friendly functionality built in, so the reader could get the information they wanted when they needed it (as opposed to it all being present all at once, creating a lot of cognitive load). Sarah’s CV contained a few elements similar to Jia’s such as clickable custom shapes and A4 dimensions (great minds think alike, plus it’s great to see them both align on data viz best practice techniques!), but also covered how to:
- Create a lollipop timeline chart to convey career history
- That also factored in having multiple jobs within the same company to make the data easier to read and reduce the height of the chart
- She also added a dashboard filter action to make extra information appear for each role when you click on it
- Plus the clicked on role’s ‘node’ changes colour and changes shape size, using pre-attentive attributes to draw the readers eye to current selection (clever stuff!)
- Improve the quality of the Tooltips beyond the defaults
It was a great demo and Sarah also shared her Tableau Public CV with everyone, so they can learn from it and use it in their CVs.
David’s Data Viz best practices + CV tips
I ran a session talking about some general data viz best practices that you can use to enhance your CV. These can be applied in any CV, including Tableau Public CVs. The focus was on understanding what the objective for a CV is, the context in which it sits and empathising with the audience who will read it (recruiters and hiring managers).
We briefly covered pre-attentive attributes (drawing the eye to key items) and Gestalt principles (subtly grouping items without lots of lines of visual clutter) to help you guide your audiences eye to the most important information on your CV for the role you are applying for.
Remember, recruiters and hiring managers have a lot of CVs to go through, with limited time. Help them help you, but making sure they see the information they need to make a hiring decision, and reduce the risk of your great experience and skills being lost in a “wall of text”. Find out more here about using Data Viz to enhance your CV or resume, along with a free template to get you started.
SG TUG Leadership nominations
With me stepping down as a co-lead of the SG TUG of 5+ years, the group is looking for another member for the leadership team. If you know of anyone or would like to apply, please submit nominations via this form they set up. It’s a great opportunity to increase your involvement and give back to the Tableau community. Personally, I learnt and grew a lot by being part of the SG TUG and got exposed to the many talented and awesome members of the community. So you should definitely consider applying.
Tableau Conference 2020
Lastly, Celine took everyone through the exciting line-up of content and guests for the 2020 Tableau Conference which will be held virtually this year. It was great to see how the event will be free to everyone and all of the content will be made for online consumption.
It’s also great to see them be considerate of EMEA and APAC audiences, with events that are during the friendly of their timezones (often with “global” US companies, you see a very US centric focus, especially with the timing of events that would occur in the early hours or late at night for non-US viewers).
Their speaker lineup is incredible with lots of celebrities, large clients and senior Tableau staff on hand to share their data stories and new upcoming features.
So be sure to register now, to access all of the great content they have lined up and start building out your schedule, to see what you want to see the most. I find it a bit confusing that 7 of the speakers are representing Einstein analytics, a completely different data visualisation tool that Salesforce owns… But maybe if I was Salesforce and purchased Tableau, I would want to cross sell as many of my products at every opportunity too :v
Summary
Having a good CV that represents your skills and experience is more important that ever. I’m glad the SG TUG dedicated this session to helping the community to develop their CVs and resumes more. You can watch the full livestream here and the slides that were covered are below.
Have you watched the livestream or used Tableau to create your CV? Let us know what you thought or share your CV in the comments below!
