One dimension, or three — and what it decides
What a reader can know before deciding
You are trying to be understood before somebody decides about you.
That is the whole task. The tailored CV, the covering letter, the answers practiced the night before or rehearsed in the car outside. All of this is you attempting that one thing with a tool that was never built for it.
What a CV can hold
A CV contains lines. They run left to right: dates, employers, titles, qualifications, a list of skills, and a paragraph near the top where you describe yourself and hope it sounds true. And your CV looks like most others someone has received.
Everything on it is the same kind of information, generally what you have done, a bit of self-evaluation, anything you might think of that’s relevant. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. It cannot carry how you did it, what you were like while you did it, what you were weighing up, what you refused to do, or what you would do next.
Think of someone you have worked with who was the reason a bad year did not become a disaster. Now write their CV. It says Operations Coordinator, 2019 to 2023, and a bit about their job and duties. The thing you would actually tell someone about them is nowhere on the page.
Some people add a few lines of endorsement. A reader skims past them, and they are right to because you chose who wrote them. You wrote the rest yourself and nobody checked any of it. The reader knows that, so they read the whole thing with that in mind. You know they will, so you write it with enhanced language. And so on it goes.
The drawing
Both drawings sit on the same ground and use the same record. The difference is what else is present.
A CV
One dimension
A line with a few lines. Everything on it answers the same question, and you wrote all of it yourself.
- ✓1What you have done
- ✕Who you are
- ✕What you think
- ✕What you are doing now
- ✕What you might become
- ✕How you behave, and your style
- ✕What you value
- ✕Enough to see how it would go
A Living Professional Identity
Three dimensions
The same record, with the other two axes present, and with the volume “turned up” where it matters. All three answer different questions, not just those you wrote.
- ✓2Who you are
- ✓1What you have done
- ✓2What you think
- ✓3What you are doing now
- ✓3What you might become
- ✓2How you behave, and your style
- ✓2What you value
- ✓1·2·3Enough to see how it would go
Why the full picture always arrives too late
Say a hundred and fifty people apply for the role. Most are read quickly. A handful sit in a room for an hour, where both sides are on their best behaviour and neither can say much that is true about how a Wednesday actually goes. One person is appointed.
And then, over the following months, the employer finally learns who that person is. How they handle a bad week. Whether they say the difficult thing in the meeting or wait until afterwards. What they are like at four o’clock on a Friday when something has gone wrong.
The failure worth fixing
The real understanding turns up in full - for one person out of the hundred and fifty, after the decision, when it can no longer be used to make it.
If the fit was wrong, both sides find that out slowly and expensively. That is the failure worth fixing. Not that CVs are written badly. That the part which matters arrives after everyone has committed.
The same picture, arriving at two different times
A CV does eventually produce a full understanding of somebody. It produces it for one person in a hundred and fifty, after they have been appointed.
The three dimensions
A Living Professional Identity is not a longer CV. It is the same person with the missing dimensions present.
What you have done
Talent Library
The record: roles, qualifications, projects, papers, awards, the media. Held in your Living Professional Identity once in your Talent Library, so it is never rebuilt from memory on a Sunday night again. This is the single line a CV draws. Here it is the floor, not the whole building.
Who you are, and how you work
Talent Story
Your Talent Story holds this: how you think, how you behave when it gets hard, what you do with a decision nobody is watching you make. Some of it comes from you, through questions built so that the flattering answer is not the useful one. Some of it comes from outside you - a personal insight assessment gives a reading of you that is not your own account of yourself, which is exactly why it carries weight.
And some of it you never consciously wrote. The format you chose, the words you reached for, what you put first, what you left out. Your style is information. A reader takes it in whether either of you intended it or not; the difference here is that it is being read on purpose.
What is happening now, and where it goes
Living Diary
Your Living Diary, kept in small entries, as they happen, added when you want. What you are doing now or have achieved in the last month, rather than what was true the last time you needed a job. What you have taken on since your title last changed. From that, a reader can see direction - what you are becoming, not only what you have been.
Enough to see how it would go
The volume
Put the three together and a reader has something no CV can produce: a fair basis for guessing how this would go. Not a score, not a match percentage, not a badge. Enough of the person to think clearly about them.
Side by side
Their advert is their CV
Now turn it around, because the same problem runs the other way.
You are asked to commit years of your working life on the strength of an advert - written while the company was at its most presentable, which is the same instinct that has you taking your best look out of the wardrobe. Fast-growing. Supportive team. Great culture. From that you cannot tell who left last year and why, what the person before you found impossible, whether the role carries the authority the title implies, or whether the thing they want done can actually be done there. It’s an advert to entice you to apply. And thinking back, how aligned was an advert to your actual experience?
Closing the gap
That is your Scout’s job. Scoutsie goes past the advert: what the company is, what it says about itself in places where it was not selling anything, how the role sits inside it, and, the useful part, where the advert goes quiet. Gaps, not verdicts. Scoutsie brings back what it found and tells you why it matters. It is then up to you what you do with it.
Both sides are on best behaviour at exactly the moment both sides most need the truth. A match is two decisions, not one.
What it is for
None of this is about looking better than the other hundred and forty-nine. It is about being seen accurately, because accurate is what gets you the role you will still want in two years - and keeps you out of the one you would have left within a few months.
And none of it is work you do on the day you need it. That is the quiet half of the idea. The record is already there, kept a few minutes at a time, so when the right role appears you are ready instead of starting.
A CV asks what will fit on a few pages, and answers it in one dimension: what you have done.
A Living Professional Identity holds the other two - who you are and how you work, and what is happening now and where it leads - and it holds them before anyone has to decide, rather than four months after they did.