MBA; 14 years in Procurement: reduced opex by 27% & vendorbase by 40%; 9 years’ management; 4 years’ consultancy: FTSE 250 clients #wfcv
Rizwan Imtiazi
Why I entered the competition
"I am constantly updating, honing and improving my CV with each experience I have during my job search, and with each new tip or piece of advice I pick up. So when I saw the competition preamble about waffle-free CVs, I was compelled to examine my own and see how I could minimise unnecessary information. I needed to reduce the word content of my formal CV as it had started to creep well on to the third page.
"The problem is of course that we always try to make the CV a story of our professional lives. We want to include everything in it so that we don't miss out on a potential opportunity because we excluded something. So, I considered the competition as a way to practise reducing irrelevant information from my CV."
How I wrote my #wfcv
"Admittedly, the requirement was, by every measure, quite an extreme version of a minimalistic CV. However, doing it in this extreme manner helped me to understand the principles, which I could then apply more realistically and sensibly to an actual CV.
"I had about seven iterations before I worked out how to exclude the wrong things and include the right things. As my Management Accounting lecturer used to say: “Forget the peanuts, just look at the coconuts”, i.e. look at what really matters and what information actually registers in the mind.
What I included
"I started with the basics – what information needs to be included? Education, employment, roles in each employment, experience in each role.
"What actually matters in each? Well, the common thread is what you have achieved in all that time. So I only needed the top level attained in each area.
"Then, what will get an employer's attention? This is where it gets tricky because it’s subjective and dependent on what the employer is looking for. Many people go for some sort of prestige – a list of clients or industries, for example. I also wanted to include a list of career highlights or achievements to note (something that I currently have at the top of my CV). So, for my micro CV, I went for what would be eye-catching to someone looking to employ in my field.
What I left out
"Having written down all these elements, my waffle-free CV still looked like a small paragraph (and therefore far too long). I then summarised, abbreviated and pigeon-holed wherever I could. For example, I wrote a list of clients as FTSE xxx.
"What still gets in the way after all this is good English. That is where punctuation can be used to full effect; the commas, colons and semi-colons in my micro CV enabled me to convey a lot of information without losing the context."
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