Covering letter to IT company re: QA vacancy

Resume US English CV UK English
 
Hello, I'm Victor, 29 years old.
My first work in IT started a long ago - in my student days,  when I did a lot of "anykey"? work at a hosting provider. I've since learned a lot about networks, Linux, *BSD systems and PCs.
Then I was invited to join a developer's company, to design and implement a brand new desktop operating system, with a very high level of security. We ported a lot of programs from Linux to our system. I was the administrator of a few workstations and tested programs on them.
But the business was unsuccessful, so after two years I had to find a new job. The new job was at a game development company. In Russia we translate games into Russian. Sometimes it's just a text translation, sometimes it needs to be fully tailored to the Russian market, including fonts, texts, voices, videos, textures and in-game objects. I worked as a quality engineer and did some programming: making Excel macros for voice recording, plugins for Redmine and tools for extracting and packing? game resources.
Game development - a great industry, but not in Russia, where people are not paid enough and most work for fun and to try out new ideas. So I joined an online payments company as a QA engineer to prepare their testing process for PCI DSS compliance. All of the work was completed in less than a month... and the company's CTO was very happy about it, because before I arrived there was no QA and the system was very unstable and full of bugs. 

..while I was student

..while at university

developer's - one?   developers' - more than one?

'stuff' is an informal and general expression

Good luck Victor!

To whom it may concern*,

My name is Victor. I am 29 years old. I have worked in IT** since I was a student, at which time I did a lot of work for a hosting provider. I have*** since learned a lot about networks, Linux, *BSD systems and PCs.

I was subsequently invited to join a developer’s company, to design and implement a brand new desktop operating system, with an extremely high level of security. We ported a lot of programs from Linux to our system. I was the administrator of a few workstations and tested programs on them.

After two years of working for this company****, I found work with a game development and localisation company. In Russia, we translate games into Russian. Sometimes it is just a text translation, and sometimes the game needs to be fully tailored to the Russian market, including fonts, text, voices, videos, textures and in-game objects. For this company, I worked as a quality engineer and did some programming: making Excel macros for voice recording, plugins for Redmine and tools for extracting and packing game resources.

Game development is an exciting and stimulating industry. However, in Russia, people are not paid fairly for their work and instead work mostly for fun and to try out new ideas. Therefore, I joined an online payments company as a QA engineer to prepare their testing process for PCI DSS compliance. All of the work was completed in less than a month*****, and the company's CTO was very happy about it, because before I arrived there was no QA and the system was unstable and full of bugs.

*Rather than 'hello', you should use a formal greeting. You can use 'Dear Mr. X', 'Dear Director', or if you don't know 'To whom it may concern'.

**In English, - is used differently to in Russian. You would not need ‘—‘ unless the sentence was quite complex. So, for now, you should try to find other ways to write your meaning. Here, you can just use a comma (YOUR WORDS: ‘My first work in IT started long ago, in my student days, when…’). But, actually, David and I made your sentence more formal.

***Contractions (it’s, I’ve) shouldn’t be used in formal writing. You have to write it in full: it is, I have, should not :)

****It’s better to avoid negative things like this in a cover letter. If they ask you in the interview why you only stayed two years, you can tell them then.

*****Ellipses (…) are only used like this in informal emails. Definitely do not use this kind of punctuation in formal writing. In formal writing, ellipses are ONLY used in quotations, to show some words were left out. You won’t need this in a cover letter :D