If My CV Were a Character Backstory

“Kate is a Healthcare IT consultant and former EHR vendor employee with experience managing all aspects of electronic health record implementations.”

That’s how my resume starts. Not bad, huh? Don’t answer that.

Honestly, I’m not sure whether I even wrote it. My resume has gone through so many iterations, so many pitches, passed through so many hands over the years- it might’ve been written by me, or it might’ve been written by a colleague as part of a pitch packet.

That’s the nature of consulting. You work contracts, you build out a catalog of experiences. And when pitching clients, you tailor resumes to the relevant experience. You focus down. Highlight the knowledge that matters to a client’s project and spare them the time digging through extraneous info.

A tailored resume can make everything look logical. Cohesive. As if each step were strategic and you were the grand architect all along. But things are rarely so curated IRL. To be human is to be full of surprises.

The best (and worst) days of a career aren’t even on a resume. But imagine if they were. A world where everyone is honest about their insecurities and prides. A PROFESSIONAL SKILLS section listing the bad memories that replay at night, right next to glowing feedback emails squirreled away in personal inboxes.

Hats I’ve worn: project manager, barista, tech analyst, director, social media marketer, artist. I’ve worked for hospitals, art fairs, public health, Starbucks. 5 countries, 4 languages. Coast to coast and living abroad. Separated by time and distance and feeling from where I started.

And now I’m here, writing fiction.

Why?

If you’ve been reading closely, you may know where this is going.

There is no obvious answer. Bad news, because internet culture today loves an easy pitch. The writer or photographer or artist, the jeweler, chocolatier, designer (really anyone) who always knew, and they are just chasing their destiny.

And for some people, I’m sure it’s true. Honestly, I envy them.

Not me, though. I’ve always been led around by the nose by whatever caught my interest or people I liked working with. Most of the jobs I’ve taken were less about resume building and more about who seemed kind and competent in the interview. It’s been a run of good luck.

What I love is people. I love understanding how people do their work, what they need, what’s going well and what causes friction. I love their stories. I love the why behind what people do. It usually come somewhere after, “We’ve always done it that way.”

I guess a resume is a kind of story. A protagonist, a character arc, and the promise of an earned conclusion.

As for me? Well.

I started this all by saying a resume highlights the knowledge that matters to a client’s project and spares them the time digging through extraneous info.

Let me rewrite that in a different way. Humor me.

A writer highlights the knowledge that matters to a story and spares the reader the time digging through extraneous info.

And maybe, by the end, you really are the grand architect.

What have we learned? A little? Not much?

The point is: We don’t know yet. We’ll only get a sense of the resume in the future one day, connecting the dots in retrospect. And the more dots collected along the way, the more interesting that picture might be.

A career, like a story, doesn’t always make sense from the middle.

Hold on did I just make a point

xo,

Kate