Earlier this year my partner and I began to consider what our next step might be along the international education road. To be fair, we came at it from a very cushy spot. We have great jobs in a great school. We love Tokyo and living in Japan. But part of this life we’ve chosen is about exploration, moving on and discovering new things. So inevitably we know we’ll eventually look elsewhere, be it next year, the one after, or somewhere further down the road. It’s a cyclically exciting time when colleagues begin announcing their destinations for the coming year and it always gets my imagination going.

So a few months ago I confronted the reality that if I was to consider a transition, I had to get my resume up to speed. I know myself. And I know that a little phrase like “get my resume up to speed” actually means days, if not weeks of fiddling with design and content until the beast is tamed. I also know that to update a design for me often means a complete re-invention.

I started by looking at the last CV I’d put together (below). Not bad.

The text was nice, the essential ingredients were there. It was legible and navigable, without looking like everyone else’s. Lovely pictures of some of my ex-students, brought back nice memories and made it clear that this was a document about working with kids. But I recalled an interview with a kind principal where she noted that though it was a great CV, she wanted to see the pictures in colour! It made me ask myself, why are CVs so dominantly black and white?

So the process began. I started to look at the many ways the idea of a resume has been reinvented over the past years. I looked at much-lauded dynamic digital resumes, as described here on Mashable. I looked at the self-promotion websites of other international educators, like my friend Sean’s and prolific edutech Langwitches blogger Silvia Tolisano. I even played with some infographic generator CV platforms, like visualize.me and re.vu. I was even quick enough off the block on the latter to nab the domain re.vu/jamie!

An infographic resume generating platform: re.vu

While I saw the benefits of all these ways of framing yourself professionally, I also decided that I needed to start somewhere, and that one element of these tools of self-promotion would inevitably the “traditional” paper resume. So, with color, design and content in mind, I started to build the friendly orange monster dwelling below.

I started with these considerations… It would have to be a design-intensive, but print-friendly document. Adobe InDesign became the tool of choice. It was likely to make it’s first impact on anyone on-screen, and so any interactivity would have to be hyperlinked. This required a platform allowing for a quality publication of a pdf file, which retained links and printability. Issuu won. I decided to maintain the lovely student images of the past, but couldn’t bring myself to make them full-colour from a design perspective, so settled on a warm rusty tone that complemented the orange and yellow visual elements. An added consideration was the addition of QR codes to allow readers with the print copy in hand to access materials with their mobiles.

Weeks later, it was ready to publish.

Months later, it already needs an update.

[pinterest]

 

10 Responses to Resumevolution

  1. Wow, amazing resume Jamie! It looks great and shows that you are a great designer/IT user. I loved that you explained the process as well, really interesting to hear the how and why.

    Good luck finding a new job, I’m sure you’ll get snapped up in a heartbeat!

  2. Sonya says:

    I just updated my resume last week. Guess what my color scheme was??? ORANGE! And grey, actually. John thinks it looks like our wedding invitations 🙂 Would you be ok with me sending you my new resume to take a look at and give me some feedback?? Let me know. And good luck with the job hunt! Like Mitch said, you will be snapped up in a heartbeat!

    • Jamie Raskin says:

      Hey Sonya,

      Just had a look at your CV and I really liked it! Very cool, very innovative approach. Concentric circles are hot! Really interesting way to bring together the meat of what you’ve done in all of your places of employment, without itemizing them one by one too. It’s a bit jarring to scroll vertically through text that’s laid out diagonally, but I think the simplicity and dynamism of the design really pulls you in anyhow. I also think it would probably work great on paper. Have you printed it to have a look? Btw, everyone should see this at: http://sonyaterborg.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/resume-sterborg.pdf Thanks for sharing!

  3. Jane says:

    Once again, Mr Jamie, you ROCK CV design! I’m impressed, as will be future recruiters. Glad to hear you’re happy where you are, but well do I know the lure of “where are you going next?” Good luck!

  4. Adam says:

    Hi Jamie,

    Really enjoyed reading this post. I’ve been experimenting with a few different formats for my digital CV, as well, and have been similarly inspired and frustrated by the options.

    Like you a key component that I have been looking for are embedded links within a more visually appealing medium. One place I have turned has been to interactive maps of buildings and campuses because they let the viewer move in and out of different physical contexts. I am interested to see if the metaphor could be used to move in and out of different temporal contexts. The challenge I keep bumping into is then how to make it searchable so that a viewer doesn’t need to navigate only through the graphic interface but could find things from key word searches.

    Other than the search feature, I think one easy solution may exist in facebook’s timeline. One idea I plan to give some time to is a full public separate facebook profile that only has information related to my career on it.

    Thanks for posting your ideas on this! It was great to find.

    • Sonya says:

      Always thinking! Having seen the link to re.vu (a site I had not heard of but have now thanks to Jamie), I started playing around with it. Not bad. Fun actually. But I like the idea of the buildings too. Let us know how the dedicated Facebook page works out.

    • Jamie Raskin says:

      Interesting. Towards the end of my undergrad I was playing with interactive media for the first time and decided to build myself a film resume by constructing a 3D multiplex with my movies in each theatre… I got about a third of the way in before abandoning ship. It’s seriously hard to model 3D popcorn. Anyways, I imagine there would be interesting tools to use for the building CV you mention. I’d love to see it! Cheers for the comment.

  5. I’m convinced that you and Elif could make money designing CVs for international school teachers. I know I would pay. Fantastic.

  6. Great work Jamie! But, it begs me to reconsider your previous post on branding! ; )

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