Last week we wrote about having a living C.V. and using it as part of your Career Development tool-kit. So how do you actually write your living C.V. and how do you keep it up to date? If you already use a career journal writing a living C.V. will be straight-forward and can be an extension of your career journalling. But what if you don’t keep a career journal…. how do you get started?
How to get started with writing a Living C.V.
If you haven’t already got a career journal you may wish to kick-off by building up your career history and history of achievements. Why not use one of our free printables to get you started – take a page and write about your achievements for each year. When you get to this year, write about your achievements each month and keep the rest of the monthly pages, for your monthly review going forward.
By building up a back story of your achievements, you can then write these up in your “Living C.V.” document, which should be a live C.V. document that you keep on your computer. This C.V. should be in chronological order setting out your key achievements to date.
Your Living C.V. Monthly Review
Each month you should carry out a review of what you have achieve that month and keep a record. This should include everything (no matter how simple) as you never know when it might be important or useful.
You should include things like:
- deals you have worked on
- things you have worked on that have been reported in the press
- interesting learning points
- things you took responsibility for
- other achievements both inside and outside of work
- extra projects you have worked on.
Pulling it together
Once you have carried out your end of month review, you should add these achievements to your C.V. in the relevant place in your C.V. and split them into examples of work, skills development and achievements. If you are looking to get a promotion you should also put emphasis on your responsibilities so that you can demonstrate that you are ready to step up.