As a person who screens mechanical new hires I can say the #1 Problem I see is bad spelling on resumes.
#2 is loaded resume with worthless paper. Lots of ex-Navy applicants have loads of paper.
Fall on their face in interview.
Oh. Resumes. Well, that's another thing I never understood - job offers are all business slang, they expect some university degree and they talk a language that is, in my perception, only suitable for bullshit bingo. For me this was always an entirely different world - the world of strange people wearing suit and tie. Anyway, I was a hippie, and computerwise I came from the hobbyistic mailbox scene, then figured out about unix and internet ~1987 - and then decided I want to have that and make it going.
At some point, people started to press me quite hard to get a job. So I decided if I find any job offer where the people could actually spell u-n-i-x, then I would write a resume. I found somebody teaching me how to wear the proper clothes - that was the bizarre part, clothes seem to be a semiotic message, and people actually believe in that crap. I knew it works for fetish clothes, mail-order fancy & friends - but this here is about rational business people, and why would they believe in clothing?
Okay, end of story: I found a few appropriate offers, but didn't get any job. Then, accidentially, I came across something totally different: they didn't look for a systems adminstrator, they wanted a consultant (whatever that mignt be). But, see above, they could spell u-n-i-x correctly . So I made a fun of it. And they invited me. They talked to me, for 20 minutes. They dared to ask me if I can install unix. I answered, honestly: that, and I can also write you a new kernel device driver if you might need one. They went out, they came back after 10 minutes and gave me a contract. They wanted to pay twice as much as I had expected. It became almost four times as much over the next years, without me ever utterling a single word about money.
The next years I spent in hotels and airplanes. Nobody ever told me anything about what I should do, it was that simple: here is your customer's address, see what they need, make it going. And I just did what I had figured out and considered proper unix. (As mentioned before, unix is a religion, and so you do it like a priest would do their sacraments.)
The other guys there were basically people with a university degree. When they asked me, I said I got my education from the ChaosComputerClub (which is true), but I don't think they understood what that means. But they started to call me 'guru'. and I suppose they meant it seriously.
A couple of years onwards, an American shop bought the consulting house, They decided they need to guarantee their customers 100% skillfree services, and therefore they fired all the people with skill and kept only the business consultants.
So finally I was back where I had been before: longterm-unemployed white trash.