The IT CV, where do I begin and where do I end? And there it is in the proverbial nutshell. IT professionals need to have a CV that can run to the length of a telephone directory. Listen carefully, you are very, very wrong. What you need is a Professional CV that is 2 or 3 pages long. Nobody wants to know how much cat5 you have seen in your career or how much coffee you consume while thinking about mainframes. Recruiters and employers want big punchy numbers, names and associations. Before you all start writhing around on the floor in terror at the thought of cutting down your 10 page CV its not all good news (get your heads around this, it IS good news). The bad news is that you can show the detail of the projects as supplementary information that you send with the CV, or, similar to how a reference would be used make it available, as a technical document, upon request.
Convinced yet?
Of all the people in employment or looking for employment you are the ones that should know better. You are in competition with others of your kind and you ALL do the same thing, you list and list and list. Even though you are in competition with each other you need to consider what all those lists look like; Pages from a telephone directory? A field of Knot Weed? Tech people like to try and prove they have ability by writing every conceivable project detail on their CV. We, as Professional CV Writers, understand this but we are here to help you walk into enlightenment.
For businesses it’s all about the lovely numbers first.
If your project saved £3 million with a deployment budget of £10K then make sure this is what you say first. How you achieved this is needs to be highlighted too but keep it to a couple of points.
You now have 2 options:
If you want, as mentioned earlier, create a technical document that follows the same timeline as your CV. Within this put as much technical information as your heart desires but make sure it is clearly headlined, segmented and follows the same chronology as the CV. This will allow anyone that wishes to look at the technical aspects the ability to do so in a very simple and quick way.
Or you can use a Core Capability/Career Highlights CV. With this CV we create impact by seperating and defining key areas of your Core Capabilities and your Career Highlights which give the reader a very clear and succinct profile of what you are capable of and what you can potentially add to an organisation.
Need more convincing?
This is usually where someone at the back of the room would shout that their talent will not be spotted if they use a short CV. Yes it will, but only if you have the ability to cut the CV down and emphasise the quality. If you can manage your CV into 3 pages then use the last page to highlight all your technical qualification.
Simple.
We used this system for one of our clients a couple of weeks ago and within 2 days she had landed a job with HP in New Zealand. A true story.
Remember this:
You can break the rules and have a CV of three pages.
You can have an IT CV of three pages.
You can show your qualifications AND your talent.
Consider this; When you condense something correctly it will become stronger.