Think about repositioning your Resume/CV

EDITOR: The old-fashioned résumé or CV answers a simple question: What have you done?

That question still matters, but it is no longer sufficient. The modern professional profile must answer more searching questions: Who are you?

How do you think? What can you contribute? What do you stand for? And why should others trust your work?

Do not abandon the traditional résumé; reposition it.

Keep a concise résumé for formal requirements.

Alongside it, build a digital portfolio that demonstrates the quality, range, and relevance of your work.

Create a simple personal website as well. This is no longer vanity or self-promotion for its own sake. It is part of the infrastructure of professional identity.

Your website can become a living record of your intellectual and professional life: essays, reflections, commentary, lectures, interviews, publications, projects, presentations, examples of community or professional work. Include testimonials and endorsements.

The objective is to create something more substantial than a chronological record of employment. You are not simply documenting where you have been.

You are showing the world who you are, what you think, what you value, and what you can do.

Employers, collaborators, institutions, and clients want more than a list of accomplishments.

They want evidence.

Proof is more persuasive than claims.

A résumé can tell that you are an accomplished writer, an effective leader, a strategic thinker, or an excellent communicator.

A digital portfolio can demonstrate it.

It can show how you write, how you analyse, how you teach, how you lead, how you persuade, how you collaborate, and how you respond to complex problems. It allows people to encounter the work itself rather than simply read a claim about your ability.

A living CV is not a document produced once, updated occasionally, and then filed away. It evolves with you. It records not only where you have been, but what you are thinking about, creating, learning, and contributing now. It allows you to frame your life as a coherent arc rather than a sequence of jobs. It connects personal history to professional purpose and makes visible your voice, values, intellectual curiosity, and sense of direction.

This approach is particularly important for people whose careers do not follow a straight line. That is the reality of professional life in the Caribbean, where one individual may move across teaching, law, journalism, public service, activism, business, the arts, scholarship, and community work.

A conventional CV struggles to capture such a life. A living CV can.

It can also accommodate something the traditional résumé largely ignores: presence. Your professional identity is not only what you have written. It is also how you speak, how you teach, how you present an argument, how you engage an audience, and how you communicate an idea. Short video introductions, recorded lectures, interviews, presentations, podcasts, and other forms of multimedia can complement written material and give people a sense of the person behind the credentials.

Organizations are today asking questions that a conventional résumé cannot adequately answer: The old-school résumé reduced a life largely to employability: education, positions held, responsibilities, achievements. The emerging model restores something that was missing: personhood, voice, agency, and intellectual identity.

So keep the résumé. But do not let it tell your whole story.

Build the portfolio.

Develop the website.

Curate your work. Make your thinking visible. Let your voice be heard. Keep adding to it as your knowledge, experience, interests, and contributions evolve.

In a world crowded with claims, evidence becomes a form of credibility.

Your CV should tell people what you have done.

Your living CV should allow them to go way beyond and see much more, even who you are becoming.

Maralyn Ballantyne LL.B. Hons.