Experts highly recommend maintaining a continuous record of your work experiences. This invaluable document is commonly referred to as a Master CV. It will meticulously detail every significant aspect of your professional journey, spanning from your day-to-day accomplishments to major accolades.

When you decide to pursue new career opportunities, this document becomes an indispensable reference point from which you can effortlessly extract and incorporate the most pertinent and current experiences into a tailored resume for the prospective job.

It is not you’re a showcase of your most notable achievements, it’s a comprehensive repository of all your career-related information, supported by the evidence to qualify and quantify, and notes of contacts or references to enable you to validate and verify it.

Organize your document in a format mirroring a standard resume: Begin with your name and contact details at the top, followed by a list of experiences presented through titles and bullet points, and conclude with a roster of your skills at the bottom. It’s crucial to keep this document regularly updated.

Keeping this document up-to-date ensures that when the time comes to craft a resume for a prospective job, you won’t have to search your memory to recall accomplishments from past positions – everything will already be documented. The relevant content can then be extracted to match the job description you want to apply for.  

Keep this document on your desktop so that you quickly and easily add your latest achievements, projects, events… etc. as a bullet point. This way, you can easily reference it in six months without the need to recollect what you did a year and a half ago. Adding a note of others involved will enable you to identify who else was involved, who your manager was and others important to the work. These can be called upon to validate and verify your work as a personal referee.

When determining what to include don’t hold back. The rule to apply is to forget brevity and focus on detail. Include awards, successful projects, promotions, title changes, and any other notable achievements. Remember this is Your Master CV of your personal record of your career milestones and accomplishments so don’t hold back. When you need to use it you’ll extract content to create a CV that Matches the Job Description.