Oi! Technical people! No!

Ahhhhh, the humble curriculum vitae. The sales document we all need to create and maintain. It's pulled out and dusted off whenever we think about getting a new job, or if you're a contractor, or freelancer it's wielded to agencies at the drop of a hat.

In the professional services organisation where I work I get to see a lot of CVs, mostly from 'technical' people. Consultants and engineers who are applying for a permanent job with us, or people who might be coming to work for us on a contract basis. Sadly, almost without exception these are truly dreadful documents. In fact, no they are awful in the truest sense of the word - I am have awe inspired in my soul at how anyone could possibly hope their skills might be sold using this document.

'of course they're bad' I hear you say. 'These people aren't sales people, they're technical'. That's not helping here. The CVs that cross my desk have already been vetted by an agency and then the worst ones have been weeded out by the first point of contact within Applicable - our consultancy team leader. These are the BEST of the technical person sales documents.

So what's the big problem?

1. Spelling.

Even the most basic word processor has a spell-checker. Use the sodding thing. There is no excuse for bad spelling in this document. It is for presentation to potential employers - this is your best and possibly only opportunity to present you and your skills. Don't screw it up with poor spelling. Things like 'consultacy' and 'implementated'. These are elementary cock-ups the like of which professionals should not be making. What if I ask you to write a client-facing document? How impressed will they be if it's rife with spelling mistakes. Sort it out.

2. Sentence construction

When you've finished your CV, if you're not sure about your english skills, print it and take the document and a pen into an empty room and read it out loud - you will pick up a multitude of errors that you would have missed this way. I've seen documents with paragraphs that are a single sentence; a whole CV made up of bullet points. Read what you write and speak it. The quality of your document WILL improve.

3. Length

I have seen CVs 12 or 14 pages in length. Only a navel-gazing, self-important, self-absorbed idiot with no social skills would consider that their skills and experience were of such great significance to a potential employer that someone would read past the first couple of pages. Where were you people during the lesson about CV building where the teacher said 'a CV should never be longer than 2 or at most 3 pages? This is a sales document, not a bloody essay. There is no word count to fill here. Summarise your experience succinctly. Your most recent experience is far more interesting than that of 10-15 years ago.

4. Currency

On the subject of summarising things. When you add new experience into your CV also take the time to review and compact down your prior engagements - they become less interesting and thus space-worthy with each new position. You should not leave these extended essays squatting in your documents, like unwanted turds. These are the reason that your CV bloats out to 10-12 pages. Quit the jibber-jabber and get to the point. If you have large chunks of short engagements doing a particular sort of work, summarise that period in one hit - yes it's important that it's accounted for, but not in minute detail, 10 years later.

That's it. Four points: Spelling, currency, sentence construction and length. Now quit making such a bloody meal of it and get me some documents I don't need to spend a whole day getting to a situation where I'm happy sending them out to customers.

Random post - tuned headers

Found a great page about tuning exhaust headers here

Useful background information, if you like that sort of thing.

When not in the workshop, or trawling the net for petrolhead information I've also managed to read a considerable portion of Now Is Gone, which is excellent and I'm going to be annoying those around me by recommending they read it, ne thrusting it into some of their faces and telling them to read it!

I will get people to let of of the message!

Annoying apps 'n' stuff

Found this post through techmeme, which made me chuckle - comparing various applications to characters is entertaining.

I guess Joomla would be a really good handyman with a funny accent.

At the moment in work we're pushing for more comments on blogs - looking at Google results it appears that if you comment on blog sites and leave your URL with the comment this is counted as an inbound link, which will boost your Google pagerank - this we like a lot and I think it's worthy of further exploration. As a simple marketing type I'm not really in a position to contribute much in the way of comments in the messaging environment, so it's over to the techies etc to make informed comments on any blogs they read.... I'll wait to see if this has any effect, I guess.....