When should an IT professional update his CV?
Today’s reality…
An unprecedented growth in the IT industry brought a high demand for IT professionals. Every day, there are so many jobs offers sent to the mailboxes and LinkedIn accounts of IT professionals, that forces each IT professional to have an updated CV always ready.
When should an IT professional review his CV?
Whether you are ready to apply for a new job or not, reviewing your CV regularly, to reflect the progression of your skills, responsibilities and successes, is a sensible long-term career management policy. We recommend reviewing your professional experience every 6 months (or at least once a year). After all, if you service your car no less than once a year, why wouldn’t you review your CV and online profiles at least as often?
A CV is a constant work in progress. And, just like your car, if you don’t service it regularly, it won’t perform as well as it could.
Even if you’ve been in the same role for years or aren’t ready to apply for new jobs, you gain new skills, experiences and successes regularly, and it should be reflected in your CV and online profiles.
There are other advantages of reviewing your CV and online profiles regularly. These include the ability to quickly apply for your dream job if it becomes available and projecting an accurate representation of your abilities to hiring managers and online colleagues. Regular updates also ensure you have relevant details fresh in your mind at the time of writing.
What questions should you ask yourself when updating your CV?
When the time comes for your CV revision, there are a few things to consider:
- Firstly, what new roles, technological skills or other skills have you achieved/developed since the last update?
- Is there a project you’ve worked on that you’re proud of? If so, add it to your CV.
- Have you completed any courses, certifications or been recognised for a job well done? If so, add these details.
- Can you quantify your accomplishments? Hiring managers and recruiters love to see hard evidence of your success.
- Have your duties and responsibilities increased? If so, summarise these responsibilities and the outcomes you’ve achieved.
Attention: Double check data consistency
Very often, IT professionals rush to update their CV and forget to update the summary information in the CV and/or in their social profiles, causing a problem of inconsistency of information, which is not appreciated by recruiters/hiring managers.
For example, in the IT industry, recruiters/hiring managers search for a recipe of hard skills. Basic principles to build a good CV defend that every CV should have a summary report of experience regarding technology, roles and type of industry which are relevant for the applicant. In such a way, recruiters can easily see that exists a match with what they are searching for, and they move straight for the interview.
If you have a summary report of your skills, don’t ever forget to update it, because inconsistencies cause a bad image. Imagine, for example, you were the Team Leader in your last project, but you don’t mention “Team Leader” in your summary report or LinkedIn profile.
Save time and automate the update of your CV
If done manually, reviewing and updating your CV could be a very time-consuming task. This usually dissuades the IT professional from doing it. We want to help IT professionals save time while increasing their chances of getting selected for an interview. We do that by automating their CV creation process, with Sprint CV a IT professional can update their CV in less than 30 seconds.
Sprint CV proposes a central system, where IT professionals can easily insert and manage their professional experience. From there, they can easily generate a CV in any template, a real CV generator tool.
Check here some examples: