The eight principles — the standard
A thing that fails any of them is a document with a web address
A record of your working life is not living because it is online, or because it looks better than a CV. These are the conditions.
Kept, not assembled
Added to as things happen — a project finished, a course taken, a committee joined — in the time it takes to write two sentences. Nothing is reconstructed from memory, because by then the detail that made it worth telling is already gone.
Current by default
The record is right the day someone asks, not three days later. Nobody should have to say “give me until the weekend” when an opportunity arrives on a Tuesday.
In your own voice
Written, or voiced, as someone who was there, not as someone summarising events afterwards. Specificity and restraint are what make a record believable; inflation and compliance is what makes it sound like everybody else’s.
At an address that belongs to you
It lives somewhere you hold, not inside a platform’s search results and not as a file sitting in a stranger’s inbox. It is still there after the application, after the role, and after that platform.
Wider than roles and dates
Qualifications, papers, presentations, media, awards, the things you did that were never in anybody’s job description. A record that only holds employers is not a record of a career. History does not determine your destination.
Bends to the reader without being rewritten
The same career reads differently to different readers — a programme role and a specialist role, permanent and contract, one industry and the next. A change of emphasis, drawn from one record. Not six versions drifting apart in a folder.
Survives the machines
Most applications are read by software before a person sees them. It produces a plain, parsable document alongside the one made for human eyes, and the plain one is never decorated. Beauty that costs you the parse is a failed application.
Never scored
No match percentages, no badges, no streaks, no ranking of one person against another. A professional identity is a description, not a score. The moment it is scored it belongs to whoever set the scale.