CV improvements
Many changes
During my years of contract work, my CV (or résumé, as Americans call it) had become very cumbersome, but agencies liked it that way and it proved effective enough. I also had my summary pages that I had designed for the Computer users' year book campaigns. From May 1996 until October 1997, my CV went through several major revisions and extensions. Out of this process came a document, "The nineties job quest" that set out in detail exactly what I'd been doing between 1990 and 1997. Nobody actually wanted to read it once I told them that it ran to five pages, but the fact of its existence sent a message to employers that I wasn't idle. I wonder if Dudley metropolitan borough council would have been impressed. They can read it now in a modified form if they wish, since it forms the basis of this particular blog.
Wide consultation
I consulted many people in deciding how to improve my CV including government agencies, recruitment agencies, training centres and other unemployed people. The complexity of my past career and the contradictory nature of different pieces of advice meant that I discarded much of it, but ever since then I have been particularly proud of the way in which I present my CV. I quite liked it as it was back in the eighties, but an unemployed person needs the very best CV that it is possible to create.
The result of all those CV revisions was that I no longer held one all-purpose CV. At the time, I had a file containing a lot of different pages that I could combine in various permutations. I also had a single page CV that I could use for non-IT jobs.
Simpler now
Many of the complexities of my career in the seventies and eighties are now irrelevant although preserved in the online version of my CV, my CV IT achievements and my CV IT technical details, which are fully comprehensive but more of a historical reference than an actual CV. These days, I'm back to a single-page CV plus (for programming vacancies only) an IT supplement.
In March 1997, I attended a recruitment workshop on careers in banking and finance, hoping to find clues to a possible alternative career but finding none.
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