Tool room hiring comes down to tolerance and independence. Shop managers want the die types you have built, the machines you set up unsupervised, and whether you can take a part print and produce working tooling from it alone.
Tool and die maker with 14 years building and repairing progressive stamping dies. Surface grinding, wire and sinker EDM, and tryout work holding tenth-level tolerances on production tooling.
Here is how to write your own, and what actually gets you the call in this trade.
The first pass answers two practical questions: can you legally do this work, and are you free to start. A foreman with a job beginning next week reads for the licence, the current tickets and the availability, and everything else on the page waits behind those.
Apprenticeship, typically four years with documented hours and classroom instruction, remains the recognised route. Metalworking skills credentials awarded by national standards bodies document machining competence. Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing training to the ASME standard is valuable. There is no licence for the trade; capability is demonstrated through work and testing.
Tool rooms are short of people who can work from a part print without hand-holding, so interviews are technical and specific: how you would build a station, where you would expect wear, how you would time a progressive die. Shops also want to know your grinding and electrical discharge machining capability, since those decide how much work stays in-house.
Describe the work in the units the trade uses: square footage, linear feet, tonnage, service calls per day, machines run, crew size. Add safety record and callback rate if you have them, because on a job site those are worth as much as speed. If you have run a crew or trained apprentices, say so plainly — that is the difference between a hand and a lead.
A foreman reading this has a job starting Monday. Put your licence class, your certifications with their dates, and the equipment you can operate at the very top — above the work history — because that is the information that decides whether you get the call. Save the paragraph-style summary for one or two lines at most.
Apprentice to journeyworker tool and die maker, then tool room lead, tooling engineer or manufacturing engineer. Design and simulation work is the common route once the physical work becomes limiting.
Check every certification date is current and every licence number is right, since these are verified and an expired ticket ends an application. Keep the file simple: one column, no graphics, no tables. Our free ATS checker will confirm it parses, which matters because large contractors and staffing agencies screen automatically.
Licence class, current tickets with their dates, and the equipment you can operate — all of it above the work history — then jobs described in the units the trade uses, your safety record, and any crew or apprentice responsibility. One page, one column, no graphics.
Which tickets are required depends on the trade, the jurisdiction and the site, and the posting sets it out. Whatever you hold matters more than anything else on the page, so list every one with its issue and expiry date — these are verified, and an expired certification ends an application regardless of the work history behind it.
Hiring in the trades is fast and often informal — a call, a short conversation, sometimes a day on site to see how you work. Referral and reputation count for more than in most fields, so how you leave one job affects the next one.
Your licence class, your current tickets, and when you can start. A foreman with a job beginning next week reads for whether you are legally able to do the work and free to do it, and the rest of the page waits behind those two answers.
The usual route runs from apprentice to journey level to lead hand or foreman, and from there into supervision, estimating or running your own work. Crew leadership and apprentice training are the lines that show you are ready for that step.
One page. Employers in this field read quickly and often on a phone, and a second page rarely gets opened. Cut old short-term roles before you cut certifications or equipment experience.
Use the structure and the way each achievement is phrased, but write your own content. The names and employers here are fictional, and a resume describing work you did not do will not survive an interview.
Start from this layout, edit in a live preview with an ATS score as you type, and download as PDF, Word or image — free.
Use This Example — Free
