Ruby on rails developer skills for your resume and career

Computer Science, and IS in general, is a field that is constantly evolving. It is not enough to know what everybody else knows. Becoming a subject matter expert with deep knowledge is important to be successful in the long run. You have to pick your area of expertise carefully, keep yourself focused and educated in that specific area, and be prepared for a career of continuous learning.

The different roles our students take on once they complete our program are developer, programmer, software engineer, and development analyst positions. All of these positions involve some type of software development, be it on the front end, e.g. application development, or on the back end programming server or database applications. Besides the technical skills, the ability to communicate well and to work individually but also collaborate in a team environment are important.

Strong database skills including big data and SQL are always valued by local employers hiring our IS majors. While not technical, written and verbal communications skills are always important.

Although computer science seems like a highly technical field, soft skills are really what differentiates software engineers. One of the most important qualities of any software engineer is explaining their code clearly at various levels of technical depth and explaining why certain design decisions were made. You could write code that does amazing things, but if that code consists of snippets you pasted from StackOverflow without really fully understanding them, it will be a huge headache for anyone who needs to come into the codebase later and maintain or update it.

Another one is asking the right questions. Imagine you are dropped into a huge codebase and asked to add a new feature (very common!). There's no time to understand everything that is going on, but on the other hand, you need to understand enough of the code to do your task effectively, which involves asking questions. A failure to ask questions will likely result in you wasting a huge amount of time working on something that is ultimately not useful, for instance, re-implementing a complex function that already exists somewhere in the codebase.