News Article

Feature: The Guardian
Publish date: June 2007

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Ajay’s CV presents a young and energetic man who is four years into his professional IT career and intends to strive for further success. The size of his CV is good as is its structure, with career on the first page and the second focussed on key skills, including IT, and education.

There is much to commend Ajay’s CV as it stands, however it does fall into two traps. The first is that its opening paragraph should be more specific in respect of defining Ajay’s goals. At 23 and with four years work experience, employers will expect Ajay to define his next step rather more clearly. The opening paragraph could be misinterpreted as a young man in a rush, who has held four jobs in less than four years with an average length of service in each of 8 months. He has put himself on the job market with 6 months service with his current employer. A new employer may have to ask him/herself ‘how long can I expect this young man to stay?’ This is a dangerous message and should be avoided.

The second issue is less critical, but there is some confusion which could leave doubt in a reader’s mind and which needs to be converted into positive impressions. For example Ajay did his degree course from 02 to 07 while working. This raises a doubt, which can easily be transformed to a positive by explaining that he did the degree course the hard way – by part time and evening study. This is an impressive achievement and will overcome any issues of grade etc. A further issue is the emphasis throughout Ajay’s CV on what he got from each of his jobs, whereas most employers would prefer to read about his achievements i.e. what he delivered, how much was it worth to the business and by implication what Ajay could deliver for the new employer. This helps establish positive commercial reasons to employ Ajay.

A career counsellor might well advise Ajay to spend more time with his current employer to show that he can stick and deliver in a role, and possibly achieve a promotion. However if he is as ambitious as he indicates, then we should not stand in his way but we should warn him of the risk of appearing as a butterfly. But this threat can be significantly reduced by selecting appropriate channels to his chosen job markets. Ajay needs to make careful and selective approaches to companies he admires and avoid the mass recruitment agents who may simply spray his CV on their mass mailings. He must control the process and defend his short period with his current and previous employer (6 and 4 months) by explaining that he had much to learn in a short time, but he now needs a long term challenge in a company he admires. Genuine flattery is likely to deal with the butterfly risk.