Consulting Journal: Techniques - A portfolio of CVs

Techniques: A portfolio of CVs

by David Blakey

"I'll send you my CV". No, "I'll send you a CV".

[Monday 31 December 2001]

Your curriculum vitae or résumé is a vital tool in selling your skills and experience as a consultant. Managing your cv is easy in the early stages of your career, as you do not have very much to put into it.

As you gain more experience, your cv can grow. You want it contain as much information about you as possible, but you don't want prospects to be put off by its size.

My solution is to have two cvs and to create more as you need them. Here's how.

First, you will have the fully detailed one. This will list every assignment.

Each assignment entry will give:

the name of the assignment
the name of the client or the nature of the client's business
the dates of the assignment
the purpose
the skills and techniques you used
the outcome, and
any technical details, such as programming languages, operating environments, and so on.

As I have been working since 19 September 1966, my full cv is a pretty bulky document. Its bulk is swelled by long descriptions of some assignments.

So, I have a second one, which gives a quick summary of my career. This one lists all my skills and gives my total experience with them, usually in years and sometimes as the number I have done. (In systems development, the time is more important. In bid management, the number of bids is more important.)

It lists, briefly, all my previous employers and my roles with them. It's a summary, on a single A4 page, of the full twenty-four page cv.

Those are my two main cvs. A copy of the full one is always available in my brief-case and my agents have up-to-date copies as well. The shorter one can be sent to anyone who is interested in engaging me.

I said at the start that you should have two cvs and ‘create more as you need them’. That is because I prefer to prepare a new cv each time I write a proposal for an assignment. These individual cvs show my experience in the prospect's sector, in the required role, and with the tools and methods to be used. They are tailored to my view of the prospect's needs.

So, when I'm sending in a cv for, say, a bid management role, I build a cv that contains all my bid management experience, in reverse date order, with the level of detail for each assignment that is in the full cv. It also gives my experience in the prospect's sector. It's basically an extraction of the big one, rather than a rewrite of the small one.

So, to attract a client for a particular role, I always use a specialized, relevant cv. I have the mini-cv available to give a quick general overview of me, and I have the big cv in case anyone wants to see it.

I also have the full cv on a web site, served by a database, so viewers can select my experience based on skills and sectors and functions and even countries.

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