A lot of our lives are dependent around work. Fair enough, to an extent. We all need an income to survive and live but does that mean we need to become slaves to our CV’s?
So we all know what a CV is. Your Curriculum Vitae, to use it’s proper title. It consists of your experience, your qualifications, educational background and your hobbies and interests, essentially it’s your life on a page (but no more than two!). It provides your new prospective employer with a chronological overview of who you are. One would think this should act as an asset to your life but often your CV can become more of a hindrance.
Life is not black and white, sometimes you want to travel, you might want to change career, maybe you want to volunteer for a while or maybe the whole 9-5 scenario just doesn’t do it for you. All of these are perfectly acceptable reasons as to why you might want to change things up, but now every time you want to make a life decision you have to think, how is this going to look on my CV? So say you do one of the above. You take a bold move and decide to break the mould a bit. You go off and try something different or make a change more suitable for you. Then, for arguments sake, lets say you return to your previous industry or lifestyle a year or so later. You have to justify and explain why you made the decisions you made, why you are now returning, why you have a gap on your CV and you almost feel like you have done something wrong. Just because your CV has a bit of variety doesn’t mean you aren’t suitable for a role or worthy of it.
I find it frustrating that we seem to live in a society where, for the most part, you’re judged solely on a CV. I am an ambitious person and I want to do well but I also want to enjoy life and make decisions that are right for me, when they are right for me, and not have to worry how it will look on a piece of paper afterwards. I welcome the day when a “discrepancy” or a gap on a CV doesn’t dictate how we live our lives and diversity is welcomed and seen as advantage.
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