Why would you need a CV if you are not planning to change jobs?

Your CV or resume is a necessary document when you are job hunting. It’s a summary of your employment history, skills, and qualifications, and should be up to date and ready at a moment’s notice. But what if you have no intention of moving jobs?

Here are six compelling reasons why you need an up to date and current CV:

  • LinkedIn
  • Grants
  • Tenders
  • Speaker opportunities
  • Identifying areas for development
  • Promotion and new opportunities

 

1. LinkedIn – your profile online should mirror your CV

With over 810 million members in more than 200 countries, a lot happens on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great business development tool and it’s one of the easiest and most powerful ways to present your skills and expertise to the market. Your LinkedIn profile will be checked by clients when they meet you.

Keep your CV up to date with your roles, experiences, projects and qualifications and check your LinkedIn profile reflects your career accurately. When you meet someone in a business environment, they may check out your profile on LinkedIn. They may even have found you through LinkedIn.

Your profile should show the current company you work for, not one from five years ago! If your company doesn’t have a company page, ask them to create one – it’s a missed opportunity to not have a presence on LinkedIn for you and the company you work for. At Focused Marketing we often review LinkedIn personal and company profiles. We look at current information on the platform and suggest changes to improve profiles. LinkedIn is free and hugely important when it comes to finding work, projects, suppliers and generally networking. But your profile needs to be current and reflective of your up-to-date CV.

If you’d like to learn more about LinkedIn, check out our blog posts about boosting your online presence on LinkedIn, and 3 things you may not know about LinkedIn.

 

2. Grants – you need to be ready to hit submit!

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have introduced many new grants to assist businesses in helping them recover, grow and thrive. Not all grants are related to COVID-19, but they all require careful planning and administration to apply. At Focused Marketing we have helped many companies apply for grant funding for their businesses. It always requires submitting details of the company and its key employees’ career highlights and achievements. Additionally, many grants are highly competitive and constrained by tight timelines – so a swift response is important. By keeping your CV up to date and checking that your LinkedIn profile mirrors this, you will readily have essential information on hand to include for your grant application.

 

3. Tenders – okay, this is a BIG one!

At Focused Marketing, one of the many services we offer is helping clients prepare and submit tenders. A current and relevant CV is an enormous head-start in an already intensive workload. We always need CVs from relevant project contributors as part of a tender process.

If you don’t have a current CV, it lengthens the process of gathering info and can become stressful when trying to scramble something together. Having an up-to-date CV that you can submit to your employee or marketing agency for a tender puts you ahead of the game.

Your CV will then be tailored for the specific tender to highlight relevant projects or placed into a new template to suit, but having one available is amazing and your marketing agency will love you for it! PS, this also goes for photos – always have a current corporate headshot.

 

4. Speaker opportunities – promote yourself, no-one else will!

A great way to promote yourself and your company is to identify yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Become known as the go-to person in your chosen field or area of expertise. A quick Google will identify local networking groups that you may already be part of. Reach out to these and ask if there is the opportunity to run a workshop or a networking event you could present at.

Having a current CV will reinforce and back up your skills and expertise. The “about” or bio in your CV (which should generally match your About section on LinkedIn) can be easily extracted to be used as a speaker bio.

 

5. Identify areas for development – let’s get personal

Your CV is a summary of your career and though it’s great for other people to gain insight, it will also identify areas of personal development that you may want to pursue.

Having a concise document of your roles, achievements and qualifications is an opportunity for you to review your career to date including the highs and lows, and create goals for the future. This might be completing a qualification to support your job, or identifying an industry sector that you would like to move into. By reviewing your CV on a regular basis, your personal goals will remain your primary focus and motivation.

 

6. Promotion and new opportunities – expect the unexpected

Nobody can predict when Bob from senior management hands his notice in. You may suddenly find yourself wanting to apply for a promotion or transfer. Whether the opportunity is internal or external, you will need to go through a recruitment process which may include submitting your CV. You won’t enjoy hours spent trawling through dates trying to work out when you went to college and what year you left your last job. We can’t predict the future, but we can plan for possible career scenarios.

 

So where do you start?

This will depend on how much your CV needs updating. You may want to look at your qualifications, certificates, past payslips, references and contracts as a first step.

There are numerous free CV templates online that provide a great framework, for example:

  • Seek: Useful templates and articles on updating your CV, Seek is a great all-round resource for your career.
  • Canva: Canva has a large variety of templates and is an easy-to-use platform to create a CV. Once finished, you can download a PDF version of your CV.
  • Microsoft: Historically your go-to for templates, Microsoft has a selection of formal and informal templates to choose from.

Now that you have the reasons to update your CV, you can get started. Don’t forget to regularly review your CV and ensure your LinkedIn profile aligns. Happy updating.


Still here?… Unsure where to start? Need help with a review of your CV or updating your LinkedIn profile? Contact [email protected] or call us on (07) 3844 9664.