Make your CV or Resumé your Prospectus

Make your CV your Prospectus, make people want to invest in you.

The more career experience you have, the less detail is needed on your CV/Resumé and the more it is key to distil to the essence.

I was recently helping someone with this when I came across an article from Wisdom Well (articles from the Modern Elder Academy) called: “Remove Your Resume. Prep Your Prospectus” and I loved it, the essence being to think of yourself as someone a company may choose to invest in, much like a prospectus is typically a term used for investing in businesses or financial assets.

In my support of someone updating their Resumé after many years, I suggested to them that they radically edit down the detail in their list of career roles, and also to put a paragraph at the top summarising their strengths and what they brought to their roles over time.

In the article, they put it even better:

So, what are some of the potential features of a personal prospectus?

1. Yes, you’d include the classic resume narrative of your employment history, but you’d make it brief and add a single sentence at the end of each job that defines your key lesson or the wisdom you’d developed from that work experience.
2. Include a paragraph that outlines your “strengths throughline,” skills that you have developed throughout your career history.
3. If a modern elder is as curious as they are wise, you’d include a brief section on what you’re passionately curious about these days with respect to new skills you want to build, industries you wish to explore, or functional duties you want to take on.

The article is centred around Modern Elders, people typically in their 50s and 60s looking to “rewire, not retire”, and at the same time, I would give this same advice to anyone with at least 5-10 years of career work experience.

So, whether or not you are looking for a new role, it is valuable to do the exercise of updating your CV/Resumé every so often, but only if you don’t just make it a list, but instead make your CV your Prospectus, that way you can better see the value you bring as well as what you want to do next.