It's Never Too Late to Update
by Steve Holmes
Tomorrow your organisation could pull a surprise merger that threatens your position. Or you may meet a contact who has possibilities to offer. You never know when people might ask you for your life on paper and since it would take even an expert over a day to prepare something suitable, you need to regard this as work in progress...
The good news is that in some ways it is easier to create a CV that reflects a developed career than it would be for a young graduate. You have a track record and have acquired knowledge to which you can refer. There are themes in your career that can be woven together or separated, depending on where you want to point your next professional move
In most cases it is possible to produce one generic CV that covers everything, and may just need minor tinkering or a differently focused cover letter, depending on your target. Don't think of this as a formula that you have to stick to; the objective is rather to produce lively writing that anticipates the needs of the reader and generates interest in you without telling them absolutely everything.
I would avoid templates that restrict your self expression; the results will not compare with what can be achieved simply through good writing. Every career is so different that there simply are no rules about what you should include and how you should set your CV out. There are suggestions, freely available, but I would ignore them and use your own instincts to create something that actually works.
Internationally there are supposed to be rules but all that has also changed since the books were written. I have created CVs for virtually every location on earth including Fiji and Iceland and the only guideline I follow is to make the text as universally comprehensible as possible, bearing in mind that some nationalities and professions favour academic background, others lean to results or experience and in some circumstances it will be concepts, methods and insight that makes your case.
Mature people can afford to discard or reduce early and minor career roles, or summarise them briefly if they help paint a portrait of your evolution. Their CV will be neither chronological nor functional, but both. It will be a narrative, which means there is a story being told, a story that begins in the past, continues through the present and has implications into the future. The goal is to produce something neat, brief, alive, informative and effective that hits the target and generates interest. The goal is NOT to replicate a format that someone thought was a good idea 10 years ago.
Legitimate inclusions in a good CV that people rarely think of can be extremely effective. Sometimes I insert quotations from performance appraisals or testimonials, which can be just as convincing as a list of sales figures. Sometimes I group clusters of information around a particular theme. For example, if someone is wanting to move into e-commerce from software sales, I look at their career so far, their studies, their leisure interests even, to find things that can substantiate their claim to be able to contribute in e-commerce. And how would they do that? Sometimes just using the right 'buzzwords' - words that display a knowledge of the field - can be just as good as concrete experience or academic study.
If you move your CV away from the boring list that reads like a job definition, you need to think fairly carefully about design and headings. There needs to be an opening section that headlines your offering and it will read best if you avoid headings such as PROFILE, OBJECTIVE or SUMMARY. My preference is for no heading at that point because it is obvious that the document is a CV. Then either start with CAREER or start with PROFESSIONAL, a vague term that lets you detail everything: your training, your skills, your vision, your achievements, your intentions, the technologies you use....whatever it is that makes a strong case in the minds of the people you are seeking to influence.
When a person's career is extremely strong in narrative terms I would lead out with that aspect rather than the professional attributes, which I would put on page 2 and abbreviate. A strong career means big title job roles, blue chip employers, latest technology expertise. If you have these things, flaunt them and make them the focus of your heading style. If you don't, then flaunt what you do have.
These days you can write your CV any way that works. It is your judgement call. Recruiters respond to intelligent approaches and intelligent recruiters will look beyond any issues of aesthetic or convention if you catch their interest by telling them the stuff they need to know.
This is likely not to be the kind of stuff you can say in a boring list of bulleted job roles or unsubstantiated superlatives, which is why I am asking you to sit down and work at your CV now, well in advance of needing it, so your start to have a collection of designs, approaches, phrases and expressions that REALLY EXPRESS who you are and what you have to offer.
Writing at the level I am trying to describe is not about the nuts and bolts of putting text on a page. To achieve good results you may have to write several different iterations until the perfect version starts to shine through.
This is a big subject and this is just a taster of the issues. Steve Holmes offers consultancy in career management and CV writing and has further information available at his website: www.cvservices.net
Problem
Aged 45; facing redundancy; median qualifications; with the same company for 18 years in a variety of roles including production management, process engineering, logistics, some input to computer systems, lots of general/man management. All the jobs he looks at are demanding commercial experience related to business development and sales strategy but his CV looks nothing like that...
Solution
Stand back from the specific jobs titles and use typesetting style that minimises their impact and brings attention to professional roles and the DEVELOPMENT of his career. Make sure that every section of narrative links in to more than just his department. Illustrate the connections, synergies, relationships with commercial partners, impact of his work on product development and quality, measures taken to achieve cost reductions and efficiency improvements, how his style of management has helped reduce staff defections and improve productivity and initiative.
In other words, make the subtext of the entire CV a subtle piece of messaging that implies, suggests, validates and proves that his contribution to the commercial success of the business has been tremendous. Show that he understands that job roles are merging and the team is the future but never use crude and obvious phrases to do so. Leave in the mind of the person who reads the CV an impression of a very switched on guy who virtually invented end-to-end business process re-engineering! Use the letter to punch this message home in a lively way that does not repeat any information but achieves a very high level summary of its implications in terms of his likely future achievements.
It can be done; this is what I do for a living. I NEVER use words like RESPONSIBLE FOR, GOOD COMMUNICATION SKILLS and all the other half-baked shorthands that recruiters are tired of reading, yet these ideas are always present in the subtext.
Problem
Human resources professional, living in a jargon rich environment and worried about not having enough experience in depth to apply for HR Manager job; caught in the jargon between generalist, administration, training, development, assessment centres and recruitment; cannot any longer see the context she has worked in and how her involvement has helped shape an organisation.
Solution
For each job go back to the basics and ask the questions:
- How was the organisation when I joined and what were its systems and structures?
- What process of change came about and what aspects of that did I create, plan, orchestrate and integrate?
- What were the results and how was that organisation when I left?
Using this methodology as your subtext you end up suggesting without having to say it that you were an apostle for organisational change who was able to impact the entire culture and performance of the company you worked for. Not only did you achieve this once, but you did it in several different scenarios and could do it again in another. When you get to the interview the agenda is about what needs doing and how it might be done, NOT whether you are fit to do it.
