Curriculum Vitae 2.0: Throw the spotlight on your cv skills section
Focus on your competencies with the new way of presenting your skills in a skillmap
What distinguishes you from other applicants for a job? Maybe you are just pondering, how you can emphasise your strengths in your CV, but there is just not enough space. You have read about all résumé standards and filled the whole space of your one-pager already by listing your career path and your formal education history. And now you are wondering, where to put your skills and where you can meet the job requirements - those the job ad you are re-reading again for hours now is asking for. The two years of experience with a specific software or the four years of experience with a popular programming language have to be integrated somehow. And both accompanied with project examples. There is a good chance you may just end up squeezing them into a little box in the lower right corner of your curriculm vitae: "CV Skills Section: programming language xy (expert), specific software yx (intermediate)." That will do. Done. Apply. Rejection. Thanks for your application, but we found a better fit for the role.
Common CV structure makes it hard for recruiters to distinguish applicants. Especially, if you consider that they look at a resume only for 7 seconds. Most applicants will include a list of their work history and formal education, which can deliver important insights to be fair. But in the end, these often look similar among applicants for specific roles. A lot of employees have worked for impressive companies and have visited excellent educational institutions. But what really makes them stand out in their jobs, is what they have done and which tools they have applied to be successful. In this article I would like to introduce the tool, which will help you to tackle this challenge in your next application.
I developed the idea of a CV-Skillmap, a tool that allows to place the full focus on your skills, how long, regularly and recently you applied them, accompanied with a description of your projects in an interactive environment. The instrument not only sets out to help you present your skills adequately, moreover you will stand out with your next résumé from the applicants crowd by using a new way of sharing information about your skills.
- What are weaknesses of current CVs?
- How can a skillmap face these weaknesses?
- Why is a skillmap needed?
- How can a skillmap be created?
What are weaknesses of current CVs?
For many decades CVs have the same structure, even if the job market has re-developed substantially and job requirements are totally different compared to previous years. A stronger focus on your skills is inevitable, as job-ads mainly demand information about the applicant's skills, but CVs only have a small subsection designated for this area. I described this phenomenon already in my article The Job-Ad CV Paradoxon. As the CV skills section only makes up a little space, the information around the capabilities of an applicant are also restricted in the following area:
- CVs focus on where the applicant has been, not on what the applicant has done
- Skills are purely named or listed without any further information
- No information about years of experience
- No standardized scale for skill proficiency
As most CVs focus mainly on the career path, the recruiters receive information about where the applicant has studied, what degree the person has obtained and where the applicant has worked. This is valuable information revealing important insights about the applicant. But in contrast to the skill section, these areas occupy far too much space, which is neglected in comparison. Due to this "where"-focus, the "what" the employee has done and which skills he will bring is often squeezed into a small list of skills. The very least one can expect, is that applicants rate their skills on a subjective scale like "beginner", "intermediate" or "expert" or on a self-defined graphical 3–10 point index. In both cases no clear definition of the scales is provided and it does not give further details about the time spend using this skill (which job-ads are clearly asking for) or in which tasks the skill supported the applicant. The connection between a task overview and the cv skills section can be apprehended from time to time, but it is rarely distinctly.
How a skillmap faces these weaknesses and why it is needed?
Regarding these weaknesses, the skills should get a higher consideration in a more objective and comprehensive format. The skillmap tries to rise to this challenge with the following structural advantages:
- Skills are presented visually to attract a higher attention and share in a CV
- Skillmaps regard the invested time period (years)
- Skillmaps regard the regularity (hours per week)
- Skillmaps regard the recency, when a skill was applied the last time
- Skillmaps regard in which project or task the skill was crucial
- Skillmaps set all skills of the applicant in relation to each other
By providing all this additional information, you are giving the recruiter far more insights around your skillset. The skillmap's strength is not only the information richness, it is also that you stand out from your competing applicants by an interactive tool for visualisation.
How can you create a skillmap of your own?
Now you know the advantages of a skillmap and how it will give you a competitive advantage over other applicants, it is time to create one. One option is to regard all what you have just read and create one on your own. Depending on how deft you are with technical and visualisation tools, there are many ways to create one. I have already gone trough this process and will share an easy way here, where I created a solution with Flask and Plotly, that allows you to create your personal skillmap, save it and share your it via a link. Here is a short introduction how it works.
1. Enter your skills
As a first step you can enter your skills and provide data about the time you have applied them. Based on that information, time spans as well as recency are calculated and the skills can be placed in the right spot with the corresponding bubble size. The information in the projects and tasks field will be visible when you hover over the interactive skillmap and in the provided skills table.
2. Review, add and adjust
To be honest, it is basically only the first step and you are ready to go with your first skillmap. But for my own skillmap I made so many adjustments over time, that I created a "skillmap area", where I could adjust the skillmap without entering all information again and again. In this area I can update it and can jump back and forth between versions, reviewing the changes and ultimately share it.
3. Share
From my point of view, a skillmap can stand on its own and can replace a classical CV completely in the future. But I also see a lot of advantages by integrating it into the current résumé structure. Thus, I see three additional options to integrate a skillmap into a CV. My recommendation is to share a picture of the skillmap. Additionally, I would provide a link to the interactive version, where the recruiters can hover over the skills, zoom in and focus on specific sections. If you want to stick to the common CV structure, but want to add the skillmap as an additional online feature, you can share either a short-link or the map itself via a QR-code. In this way you may prompt curiosity and the recruiter has an additional step to get a grasp at your skillmap.
Whatever your choice is, I hope the skillmap will help you to throw the spotlight on your skills and my tool might help you in your next application process or at least gives you inspiration for your next CV.