Happy New Year and welcome back to our peer-to-peer mentoring series where the talented and thoughtful, Ms. Tara Joyce and I exchange one another’s insights into how we can grow, evolve and create the change we’re working toward in our personal and professional lives.
Today Tara answers a question for me about sprucing up and adding dimensionality to my professional curriculum vitae. Sometimes the tasks I perform for my business development clients that I can attend to with colorful creativity are the ones I have trouble accessing in my own professional life. Look how lucky I am though- Tara is going to jump-start my personal creativity by sharing her own charm today!
My Question For Tara
“Currently I keep an updated CV on file. While I’m proud of my profile and professional history, I’d like to put together a jazzed up version. I’m thinking of doing a website resume- what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of this plan and how would you proceed creatively?”
Tara’s Terrific Response
I love the idea of a website resume! I have pondered creating the same thing for myself. For now, I use LinkedIn as the place where I share my professional history (my profile) though I do find it limiting in truly expressing who I am and my unique talents.
Somewhat recently, I changed the tone of my LinkedIn profile. Before, it said nothing about how I actually spent, nor spend, my days. It said little about ME, other than where I went to school (can’t you see how smart I am?), where I’ve worked (yes, THEY hired me!) and what titles I was given (don’t I sound impressive?). I had created a very inaccurate picture of how I add value to the world.
So, I made some changes to it, with the new perspective that my resume’s purpose is not to make myself sound impressive but rather to share with you where my true value lies. For I feel my greatest competitive advantage is that I am figuring out who I am and becoming it. So, in my re-write, I focused on understanding and showing who I really am.
If I was to create a more robust and fun CV than what can be found on LinkedIn, I would absolutely take a digital approach. about.me offers a free and effective means for creating such a digital CV. It allows you to create a simple, branded webpage that can link to your various activities online and allows you to design how you would like to present yourself, whether that be in a more traditional CV format, or using a less traditional, more visual approach.
If/when I do create such a place for myself online, my design strategy would be to spend time brainstorming as to how I could present relevant information about myself in a fun, interactive way. I’d share what I have done to understand and embrace the skills – or perhaps even one skill – at which I excel. And I would attempt to hone in on what I see as my true calling and do my best to express that through whatever means felt right for me to employ. Beyond that, I’d just have fun creating what I feel is a professional, accurate representation of why I am awesomely unique!
You can read Tara’s question for me, here. I have to give credit to Lucia and Jim over at Mindopoly Center for Change for inspiring how I shaped my response to Tara’s thoughtful question.
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