Why you should update your CV for 2015

Every career advisor says “Update your resume at the end of the year.” But why? If you’re not job-hunting, who cares what your resume says, right?

Here’s why it matters. In our career coaching practice we hear about a hundred times a year, “I wasn’t thinking about changing jobs, so my resume wasn’t up to date. One day I got a call from a headhunter, out of the blue. It just seemed like too much trouble to update my resume in a hurry, so I let the opportunity pass.”
It will take you an hour or two to update your resume for 2015. It’s a great project to tackle during the last week of the year. It doesn’t even matter whether you’re planning to change jobs, or not.

When you revise and rev up your resume for the new year, you get a chance to remind yourself of how you’ve grown professionally over the past year. That’s priceless, right there!

If you’re working now, you’re going to have a performance review at some point in 2015. Why not start preparing for it now, by recalling and reclaiming the awesome things you accomplished on the job in 2014?

It’s new day in the workplace. Everyone is an entrepreneur, including you. If you don’t already have a side business consulting, now is a great time to launch one! It’s easy to get started.
Ask yourself the question “What could I do part-time, alongside my full-time job or my job search, that would help somebody solve a problem and earn me some extra money?”

It might be web design or administrative help. It could be bookkeeping or programming. Everybody has marketable skills, and everybody can grow entrepreneurial muscles by selling their expertise as an independent consultant, even if you only have one client. One is plenty!

If you don’t have a second income stream — another oar in the water, that is — going already, now is the perfect time to launch one!

To rev up your resume for 2015, pull up a copy of your old resume and review it. Ask yourself “What’s changed since the last time I looked at this?” Maybe your career goals have changed.
Whenever we look at the branding paragraphs we wrote a year ago to describe what we do at Human Workplace, they are always terribly out of date.

People and organizations evolve all the time. Sometimes the biggest changes are imperceptible in the moment, but after a year, lots of aspects of your brand and direction will shift!

Ask yourself “Does this resume still represent who I am now?” The answer is likely to be “No!” That’s a good thing. If you still see yourself the way you did a year ago, then a good question to ask is “Why am I still at the same place on my path that I was a year ago?”
We recommend that every resume begin with a Summary paragraph that goes just under your name and contact information at the top of your resume. For the Human-Voiced Resumes we write and teach people to write for themselves, you’re going to need a Human-Voiced Resume Summary.

What makes it a Human-Voiced Summary? It sounds like a person is talking to you, like this:

Entrepreneurial Marketing Manager

I’m passionate about helping small brands get bigger fast. I specialize in startup Marketing and PR. In 2014 I helped Angry Chocolates get its edible nail-polish line national press and international distribution to ramp sales from $0 to $15M in one year.

What did you make happen in the past year? You can lead with that Dragon-Slaying Story right in the Summary of your Human-Voiced Resume. Hiring managers want to know what you’ve done to help other employers and clients — that’s what gives them confidence you can do the same thing for them.
Once you’re happy with the Summary at the top of your Human-Voiced Resume, move on to the body of the document. That’s where you’ve listed your current and/or past jobs in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent position or the job you hold right now.

What can you add to those descriptions of the jobs you’ve performed so far?

What did you accomplish on the job in 2014 that you’d like to becomepart of your Human-Voiced Resume branding now? Here are some ideas:

• Maybe you solved an expensive problem for your company.
• Maybe you helped bring in a big new account.
• Maybe you improved on an old, creaky process and made it faster and more intuitive.
• Maybe you saved money for your employer.
• Maybe you taught a customer, co-worker or vendor how to do something they didn’t know how to do before.

What are you proudest of, among all your 2014 accomplishments? Include those triumphs on your new and improved 2015 resume!
Don’t restrict yourself to revising the part of your Human-Voiced Resume that describes what you’ve made happen on your current job. As you look at your resume with fresh eyes, you may see changes that you can make to your descriptions of past jobs, maybe even jobs you held years ago.

Our client Pam was a preschool teacher before she became a sales manager. Pam was laid off in September 2014 and took our course Job Search after Fifty.

“I used to think about taking the preschool era off my resume altogether,” she said. “I thought that corporate hiring managers would look down their noses at that experience. Now I see that everything I learned about patience and how people learn, I learned as a preschool teacher.”

Pam had described her preschool teaching experience in throwaway fashion on her resume for years. She listed the name of the preschool and the title “Teacher, Threes and Fours” with dates of employment and nothing else.
Now that Pam is revving up her resume, she’s looking at her preschool teaching experience with new-found altitude. Here’s how she describes that part of her background now:

“I taught communication and conflict-resolution skills and built self-esteem in very small children, using games, stories and lots of patience. When you see the world through a three-year-old’s eyes, you become a stronger communicator and coach.”

Are you surprised that Pam’s new altitude and revved-up Human-Voiced Resume got her interviews for Sales Managers, where her traditional, boring resume hadn’t? Of course not! Every thinking manager wants to hire thinking people, too.
Pam didn’t lob her resume into any faceless recruiting portals, also known as Black Holes. She sent her Human-Voiced Resume directly to each hiring manager that she identified.

She sent the HVR in one envelope with a pithy Pain Letter written just for that manager. Pam knew all about pain-based selling because of her sales experience. Now she knows about pain-based job-hunting, too!

Rev up your own resume for 2015 and put a lot more punch and humanity into it. It’s way more fun and satisfying to present yourself as a human being than to sound like every other workplace battle drone with a boring traditional resume. It’s a new year — the perfect time to step out of your box and try something new. We are rooting for you!

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Liz Ryan is the CEO and Founder of Human Workplace and is a LinkedIn Influencer.

Image: Motorized mannequins hold signs that read “Hire Me” in Toronto May 23, 2014. Canada’s economy unexpectedly shed 28,900 jobs in April, mainly due to steep declines in full-time employment and in the private sector, Statistics Canada data indicated earlier this month. REUTERS/Mark Blinch.