Cover letter - what to highlight?

[akafred]

I am applying for a job that is highly technical (but not IS). I have strong technical skills but not necessarily exactly in the things they are looking for. For example, they use C# a little bit. I have never used C#, but I have used other programming languages and feel confident learning to the level they use it would not be an issue.

What I do have to offer is skills that interface both the business and technical side. I have worked on the business side over 15 years and know what kind of reports are useful. I have done a lot of creation of reports and dashboards. I feel like maybe I should highlight this in the cover letter as it is something that someone coming from a more strictly IS background may not have, and it may give me an advantage where the technical skills are not spot on to the job posting.

Any suggestions how to word this to leverage my strengths?

[indyrowergirl]

Where I work we call that role a "business integrator" - someone who speaks IT well enough to translate the business needs into IT requirements, but who also speaks business well enough to help IT come up with solutions that the business area might not even be aware exist. Perhaps you could say something about how your unique combination of both business and IT experiences make you a great interface between the two groups? Or maybe give an example or a brief description of a project where you were able to use your technical skills to help the business (or vice versa). Good Luck!

[akafred]

I probably didn't explain the job very well. It isn't the business integrator you describe really. At our company IS is a huge beaurocrasy, and to get even small jobs done you have to show a full ROI and commit to fewer than X number of hours, get it built into the budget before the fiscal year, etc etc. It becomes about business critical stuff only.

To deal with this, many departments have created reporting workgroups to do all the day to day reporting, and often they do some small scale IS stuff (Access databases, SQL into the main database tables, etc). This job is kind of more robust on the programming side than a lot of reporting jobs as they created and maintain a web based dashboard portal, but they still are not IS. However I am worried they may not think I'm up to the programming side. I had a conversation with the other guy in the group (not the boss) and he was surprised they may have qualified internal candidates.

Does that make sense?

[sudokufan]

Ooooh, absolutely a good thing to high light. I'm in IT, and we don't necessarily expect to find someone who knows exactly every language we want, but demonstrated willingness and ability to learn languages goes a long way.

Maybe "As evidenced by my resume, I have a strong background in [whatever businessy stuff it shows]. In my current role, I have used Visual Basic to create super impressive XYZ dashboard, which was used by management to improve business processes and save $2 million a year. In 2012 I took classes in Java, which allowed me to create and maintain the ABC report which does [some nifty feature you're proud of]. Although I do not currently have experience with C#, I feel that my given my experience with other languages (mention any you haven't already), I will be able to reach proficiency quickly."

Something along those lines - I feel like the cover letter is a great place to highlight a couple of cool things you've done in detail, where the resume is usually a lot more general because you need to talk about more of your responsibilities. Although, I would tailor my resume towards the specific position too. My organization (big university) has lots of little spin off IT groups and we'll often hire from within and then send to training. Not always, but often. It's nice to have a "new" employee that already knows the culture and the business, if they can ramp up quickly enough on the technical side.

Also, do not underestimate your ability to translate between IT and business. I do it on a daily basis and it always comes back as a huge positive on my reviews. If you can come up with an example of it that goes along with your technical example, all the better. I love our programmers, but about 50% just can't seem to speak non geek. Hell, sometimes the different kinds of programmers can't seem to communicate with each other. makes me nuts.