A great resume is a form of storytelling.
It has lots of achievements, from educational to professional areas, and sometimes, even personal, which all add up to tell a good story of why someone is a great hire for a job.
My resume contained work experience that started with words like Led a client engagement that… Delivered a project that.. Built a practice worth $X Mn… Managed the product and industry portfolio… and the like. It had academic credentials highlighted. Even the right hobbies were mentioned for effect.
Apparently, it was a great story well told that worked – at least then. Because I kept getting jobs every few years that seemed better than the current one.
But after more than two decades of storytelling in corporate life using my resume, I took up actually telling stories – writing and publishing them. The other day someone who wanted to interview me asked me to send them my resume.
I started adding bullet points corresponding to my author part and fell short in words.
It seems funny to say that I led a project of 60000 words culminating in the creation of a novel. Or that I delivered a short story collection with twenty stories around the theme of travel or around the theme of urban apartment living. Or I created Jigneshbhai and Swami and almost a hundred of their coffee conversations. I couldn’t put them into the right words to form a good story.
Yet, when I think about it, I can show anyone the work that I did. Here are the full length published books. Here are the short story collections, the Jigneshbhai and Swami books, and here you will find my blog.
For the lines corresponding to the twenty plus years before that, when I think about it, I can’t show anyone the work that I did.
Where is the project I delivered or the practice I built or the clients that I engaged with or the portfolio of products I managed? I can’t find them. In some cases, I can’t even find the companies or the businesses anymore.
That is not to belittle that work. I certainly enjoyed doing that and it largely gave me a good life. But despite all the wonderful storytelling on my resume that got me the corporate jobs, I can’t seem to find the work to show.
Whereas from the past five years, I can show you all the work that I did but find it difficult to add more than a couple of lines for it on my resume. The stories are in the books, but I can’t seem to tell an impressive story of that on my resume.
On the one hand, as a corporate executive, I find a lot of storytelling on my resume with nothing to show as work, and on the other hand, as an author, I find nothing much on my resume but lots of stories to show as work. I am not sure which is better!
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