Australian Career

PractitionerVOLUME 25 ISSUE 1

AUTUMN 2014

National magazine of the Career Development Association of AustraliaNational magazine of the Career Development Association of Australia

Transforming career development in South Africa

Critical practitioner competencies

The enduring power of great teaching

Letting nature rule

Australian Career Practitioner Autumn 201418

SHATTERING MYTHS

Based on my work withadult clients, I would declare thefollowing Myths

Busted (with apologies to DiscoveryChannel’s Adam and Jamie):

❚ All workers have a résumé

❚ Workers have an up–to–date résumé(perhaps excluding current role)

❚ A business’ C-suite (‘Chief Officers’)and its General Managers have thehighest quality résumé

❚ Workers maintain a portfolio ofevidence that demonstrates theirskills/expertise, experience,knowledge and personal style insupport of organisational objectives

❚ Workers know the difference betweena curriculum vitae and a résumé; and

❚ Workers understand that a résumé is asales document developed to securean interview.

WE’RE NOT MAGICIANS!

Irrespective of thequality of the initialrésumé (if any), thechallenge for the career

professional is to help co-create a highquality document dedicated to marketingthe client. But we are not magicians!Rather, the client is the contentqueen/king, and our role is more likethat of a process consultant helping theclient to extract key content (e.g. careeraccomplishment narratives) and tostructure the résumé optimally.

Developing a high quality résumé is hard work! Sometimes, clients haveaccess to documents and resources that can be leveraged, or used as astimulus, to assist résumé development.For example:

❚ Job descriptions (although thesesometimes only indicate the initialscope of a job role)

❚ Annual performance reviews (carryingperformance against key business goals)

❚ Contract documentation (definingproject deliverables)

❚ Promotional business documents (e.g.staff profiles); and

❚ Customer testimonials.

A seasoned career professional will alsobe able to draw on their own experienceof roles to quiz the client oncontributions made to the organisationsfor which they’ve worked.

With relatively inarticulate clientsengaged in quite obscure work, you canalso draw on databases defining typicalroles. A particularly detailed, althoughNorth American-centric database, usefulfor this purpose is O*Net Online1. As an urban career professional, I found thisparticularly useful when working with agent who managed a sophisticatedcattle-breeding program for anagribusiness. By searching O*NetOnline with key words, I was able toidentify roles aligned to the client’s workand he highlighted the job elementswhich he undertook. From that base, wethen interactively explored hiscontribution to the business anddeveloped a résumé from scratch.

Are your clientsrésumés flabby?

RÉSUMÉ DEVELOPMENT

A key skill of career professionals is to help clients marketthemselves to potential employers and/or customers. As a Career Transition Consultant over the past ten years, Barry Hornehas had the privilege of helping hundreds of adults, aged mostlybetween 25–60 years of age, reposition their careers followinginvoluntary job loss. Almost invariably, this role involves co-developing, critiquing and making recommendations forimprovement of, written self-marketing documents. In a way, it is an ongoing challenge to ensure that such documents do clients justice and promote their employability.

Barry J Horne MCareerDev, GCertEd(Career Ed), Dip FP, BScExecutive Coach, Career Management Consultant, and Career Industry Educator

8 barryjh@amnet.net.au ( 08 9448 675

Australian Career Practitioner Autumn 2014 19

HOW POINTED IS YOUR CLIENT’SPROPOSITION?

So, assumingyou’ve collatedsupportingevidence

relating to the client’s career andquizzed the client on contributions to employing organisations and/orcustomers, how do we help the clientframe a sharp, focused (non-flabby)résumé? Often the key is to sensitisethe client to how other peoplestrategically market their agenda to others.

For example, the Prime Minister knowsthat on leaving Parliament House, he will face a throng of reporters. So it iscritical for him to strike with a keymessage first and then reveal layers of increasingly relevant detail to hisreporter audience.

A reader of a résumé is the targetaudience for our client. That reader mayhave competing day–to–day demands asthey read a plethora of résumés for anopen position. So it is essential thatclient résumés impress quickly andstrategically, and in a manner thatpresents the more important high-levelinformation first, before unfoldingsupportive and important detail alignedto the targeted role.

CONSIDER A GENERIC RÉSUMÉSTRUCTURE The following pyramid structure for ageneric résumé assumes that a matureadult client with an extensive workhistory is applying for a private sectorrole, without a need to respond toformal selection criteria.

In introducing this model, résuméreaders are assumed to be:

❚ time poor, in terms of the timeallocated to review submitted résumés

❚ initially focused on screening out the majority of candidates’ applications

❚ particularly interested in résumés that include achievements indicative of a capacity to solve problems or meet challenges faced by theprospective employing organisation

❚ keen to quickly view a candidate’s‘highlights reel’

❚ prepared to invest more time on arésumé that quickly captures theirattention; and

❚ interested in information thatreinforces any initial impressions andclaims made.

The following generic model has threekey parts, with largely self-explanatorysections. The following briefelaborations are offered for clarity:

RÉSUMÉ DEVELOPMENT

1. The Profile Statement is a brief,high-level offer/pitch to theprospective employer

2. An Employment Summary Tableavoids mature clients focussing indetail on old roles; and

3. Key Responsibilities can be explored,especially with managers, in termsof their (external and internal)stakeholder relationships, peoplemanagement, operational, andfinancial responsibilities.

BENEFITS In practice, I have found this modelhelpful at a number of levels.

1. Clients often need to be convincedthat their flabby résumé is in anyway deficient. Before a client willinvest their energy and time intoenhancing their résumé, they needto acknowledge its deficiencies.

2. Visual representation of the modelallows the career professional tomake a logical case for its overallstructure. This opens discussion tothe legacy rationale for its structureand format and whether the contentremains relevant. Clients soon reflecton their motives for using theircurrent résumé structure; sometimesperpetuated since early in a matureworker’s career or perhaps dictatedby, an internal recruitment processwithin an employing organisation.

3. Discussion of the model highlightscontent deficiencies in the currentrésumé and begins a dialogue aboutsources of information from which tobuild an enhanced marketingdocument. For example, the modeldemands that careerhighlights/achievements be distilledfor inclusion on the résumé’s frontpage. Career professionals can thenencourage clients to reflect on andarticulate accomplishment narratives.

4. Presentation of the model, coupledwith the right measure of coachinginfluence, challenge clients who donot perceive the résumé as a self-marketing document.

5. The résumé model opens up astrategic dialogue with the clientabout optimal market positioning. Thiscritical dialogue may result indevelopment of a number of moretargeted résumés, depending on theclient’s preferred career goals / targets

1 ˝ onetonline.org—sponsored by the US Departmentof Labor, Employment and Training Administration.