Background
At Pager Power we are often asked to provide CVs – usually requested when we are preparing tender bids for large consultancy. These CVs were weak, lacked interest and undersold our experience.
Realisation
We realised these weakness when a customer kept asking for our CVs to be rewritten. This was embarrassing given that we make our living working with people and writing complex technical reports. Furthermore CVs are important for conveying the skills and experience we have to support our customers.
Why?
We then thought about why our CVs were not up to scratch and found three reasons:
- CV writing had always been a low priority
- We are not used to writing about ourselves
- We don’t easily remember all of the projects we have worked on and what we did
The Solution
Danny, Kai and I set aside an afternoon to rewrite our CVs – this resolved the first issue. Working on each CV as a team in this way meant we could be positive about our colleagues rather than ourselves – overcoming the second issue. Talking through our personally important historic projects and searching through our database resolved the third.
The Result
We decided on a common simple one page format for all three CVs. We each formatted our own CVs and then reviewed each other’s. Whilst there is always room for improvement we are pleased with the new CVs which you can see below.
Links
Danny Scrivener’s CV
Kai Frolic’s CV
Mike Watson’s CV
Image accreditation: Curriculum Vitae by The Italian Voice via Flickr.com. / CC BY-ND 2.0. Image cropped and resized from original.
