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Methods: Your CV and assignments

by David Blakey

How up to date should your descriptions of previous client be?

[Monday 22 February 2010]


You may have several versions of your CV or résumé. You may have all the information stored in a database, so that you can prepare new versions of your CV. These can provide a brief summary of your entire career, or details of your employers and assignments in the past n years, or your experience in a particular sector (such as energy or media) or on assignments of a particular kind (such as supply chain analysis or system specification).

History

With time, your list of employers and assignments will grow. With time, some of the names of your previous employers and clients will change. Consider this example.

I worked in the Management Consultancy Services division of Coopers & Lybrand. After I left Coopers & Lybrand, it joined with Price Waterhouse to form PricewaterhouseCoopers. The management consulting division was later sold to IBM. So you might ask if I should change the name of my employer from Coopers & Lybrand to PwC or to IBM Global Business Services (GBS).

While I have worked for Coopers & Lybrand, I have never actually been an employee of PwC. I have also been an employee of IBM, but never of GBS. It is historically inaccurate for me to put either PwC or GBS on my CV.

So now you might ask if I should put a note into my CV to state that the management consulting division of Coopers & Lybrand is now part of IBM Global Busines Services. You might imagine that this would be helpful to people reading my CV, if they were not aware of the history of my previous employers.

Consider three points.

First, once I started to track the changes of name and of ownership of my previous employers, I would have to continue to track them. I would have to search frequently for such changes and then update my CV with them. So there is a new, continuous task for me.

Second, by now, several years after the merger and the disposal, there may not be much of the original management consulting division of Coopers & Lybrand left within IBM GBS. I might have been able to state that it was now part of IBM GBS immediately after the disposal, but I doubt that this is true today. So my references could be misleading.

Third, and most important, my CV is about me. It is not about my previous employers and clients. They are mentioned in my CV in order to provide some evidence of my abilities and experience. My CV is not meant to a definitive record of anything except my career. So, I used to work for Coopers & Lybrand, and my CV states this.

So, my advice is to keep the information for each employer and client as it was at the time of that job or assignment. I have worked for an energy company (that we shall call A). This company was later acquired by another company (B) and I did some more work for it. Later still, B changed its name to C, and I worked for it again. My CV shows these three assignments as being for A, B and C.

References

You may have included references in your CV. I think that this is a bad idea. It can encourage some prospects to call your referees before considering whether to engage you. If they decide later that they will not engage you, then your referees have had those calls for no purpose. This can mean that your referees receive more calls than they might expect. If this becomes tiresome to them, they may ask you to stop giving them as a reference.

Your references should be available to your prospects as final confirmation that they should engage you. So, in my opinion, they should not be your CV. You should give them to prospects when and if they ask for them.

If you do have references in your CV, then they should be up to date. You should check regularly that the details that you have for each referee are correct. This did not matter a few years ago. If you had worked for someone two years ago, you could have been fairly sure that they would still be contactable in the same company, on the same telephone number. Today, people can change jobs more frequently. You should make sure that the details you hold about them are still correct. This can be difficult if you have been with your current employer for several years; your previous employer may have moved several times.

You should always check with your referees before you give their contact details to your prospects. If you include these details in your CV, then confirm that your referees are happy with this.




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