Tue, October 11, 2011 at 12:00

Many years ago I was listening to a senior manager speak about why we didn’t think of our career like a functional review. In other words, rather than writing a time-line based resume of our working experience, why not consider how much we knew about all of the functions at work in an organisation? The enquiry was motivated by this particular individual, who was then a commercial director, stating that it had never been his intention to be a commercial director.  When he started work there were no commercial directors in the workplace! When he’d reflected on that, he had started to wonder what he knew about law, financial management and so on. Those are the key elements that made him effective in the role that he had at that time.

So how might this apply to you? Rather than thinking about the jobs that you’ve done and taking meticulous care to lay out your CV with job title, organisation worked for and dates you there, why don’t you look at your CV from the point of view of what you know? Some CVs look fantastic and people have worked for well-known brands, instantly recognizable names that will probably make people think, ‘this person must know a thing or two’. What is interesting for those who’ve worked in some of these well-known brands is that they themselves aren’t that impressive to work within. Their brand and reputation might be strong and give a better impression that might necessarily be the case. So there is can be quite a range of standards about what is good in an organisation and how it is perceived to be. At a time when companies come and go at a greater speed than ever, organisations can go from nothing to being global businesses in 10 years. This is why we argue that a skills-based CV might be useful – possibly even more appropriate.

Ask yourself, what are the underlying skills that you’ve attained and used in any job that you’ve done? In order for this to mean something, you have to think about how you used the skills, in what context, why they were useful to you, why you’re good at it them, how you found the experience and what you learnt along the way. When you do this more than once and build up a cluster of skills,  you begin to see yourself and your value rather than simply looking at a linear progression of jobs that you’ve had and may have escalated through a hierarchy. At a time when transferability of skills might be very important to us, whether we move from private to public sector, whether we’re trying to move from one function to another within the same organisation, thinking about our skills and our knowhow and thinking about those different skills and contexts gives us far more scope about how we project ourselves to others.

CVs never stand in isolation. They are but one tool amongst an array of signals that we use o project ourselves to others. Building an effective skills CV might just work for you.

View the original article here

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