The Advantage of a Detailed Career Narrative

I recently took the step of writing a career narrative. I decided to do this after my last job search at the beginning of the year. Gone are the days when you simply send a resume and cover letter. Every opening is hyper-competitive and applicant tracking systems (ATS) do an automated pre-screen using AI (read: “keyword search”) so that your resume may never make it to a human. You need to tailor your resume and cover to the opening to try and get past the bots at the gate.

I found this was hard to do when my source was the last version of my resume that I sent somewhere. What did I leave out last time? What should I put in this time? What if I forget something? (You did forget something.) A resume is a summary of your career to date. It’s something of a fool’s errand to tailor a summary from the previous summary. So… a career narrative.

A career narrative is exactly what it sounds like. It is a long, detailed, prosaic description of everything you’ve done to date.

Long. And detailed.

As of this year, my career spans 30 years. My narrative currently sits at 16 pages and I still have three positions to describe. This is not something I would ever put in front of a prospective employer, but it will serve as my canonical source for all future resumes. I should be able to tailor whatever I need out of it. Going forward, I will maintain it contemporaneously.

With what I’ve got so far, I’ve been experimenting with LLMs to summarize it and create profiles. When you are starting with known, trusted content, an LLM tends to do a pretty good job and I’ve been happy with the results so far. I’m grateful that I can get a tech assist in that area.

Ultimately, I opted to go out on my own and do consulting, so why do I need a career narrative? Simply put, every prospective customer wants to see a tailored resume to validate the applicability of your skills. Also, to verify the rate you’re charging.

So going into consulting is opting to apply for jobs over and over and over again. You don’t necessarily need to contend with an ATS, but a generic resume still won’t cut it.

So those are the practical reasons for a narrative: constantly needing to tailor and profile your resume, the existence of technology that makes a narrative workable for that purpose, and minimizing the chance that you will forget something. But I have found that there are subjective reasons to do so that I didn’t anticipate.

In going back through my career history in detail, I remembered a lot of very cool things I got to work on. Small projects that solved a hard problem. The first time I worked with open-source GIS. That time I built a map rendering engine from scratch. That proposal I wrote that won despite all odds. And so on…

Memories fade and you can begin to gloss over the details. Suddenly, you find yourself saying “I spent 15 years as a partner in a small technical services company.” Worse yet, you find yourself writing it that way and disregarding a lot of details that may just resonate with the current prospective employer or customer. I’m lucky that I have a 17-year blog to mine for some of those details.

This exercise has been hard, but rewarding. If you are reading this and you are an early-career professional, start your narrative now. Leave nothing out, even the mundane reporting you’ve done. It can all add up to significant project management or leadership experience later. For me, starting now and looking backward, it’s been hard and I’m certain I’ve still missed things. For you, if you stick with it, you could have a 60-to-100 page narrative by the time you’re thirty years in. That will be one hell of a resource as you seek later-career roles.

I am happy that I chose to do this. I am learning a lot about myself by revisiting this. You will be happy with yourself, too. Write the story of your career down, keep it going and it will be the most valuable thing you can give your future professional self.