A different way to represent your project work.

On my blog, I wrote that job descriptions Suck! Not every job description I have ever seen is really bad, but what I have seen is the tendency to condense job descriptions down to more general terms. Thus removing the uniqueness of a particular job description.

Likewise there is the tendency to requests smaller and smaller resumes.

"Can you make your resume be only one page?" I have heard a few times. That can be a little difficult for those of us without name recognition. It also limits the type of things that we may need to focus on.

Having a one page resume you almost have to make it SEO optimized using proper keywords so that you can be found. Most job boards use tools like SOLR, or some proprietary indexing tools. They take job descriptions, and resume's then index them behind the scenes similar to the manner in which google indexes the web.

If our job descriptions are tiny, and our resumes are supposed to be tiny, how does someone stand out and be found in this space?

I don't know the answer to that, but as I considered this problem, I came up with a new question:

How can I show that my project work matches more than a single job description?

What if I wrote about all of the various projects I have done whether they were "jobs" or not, and demonstrated how similar these projects were to multiple job descriptions?

Seldom have I had a job where I did a single thing. I was always "a bit of this", and "a bit of that". In today's gig economy we make the effort to turn people into commodities, so how can a person that did a project, or multiple projects demonstrate that during their work on a given project they actually wore more than one hat?

Here is my answer: Doug Needham

This is pubProjX. You do a write up of your project work, submit it to the site, and you will have a visual summary of your project work. Each visualization shows that top 10 job descriptions, and how closely your project work matches these job descriptions.

You can also show the keywords that match those job descriptions, and the sentiment you describe in working on the project.

The top visualizations are a word-cloud of your overall write-up, a career path graph summary, and the top job descriptions you have matched throughout your career.

This is a bit of a research project at the moment. If you want a profile, follow the instructions and send me a csv file, follow the paypal link if you want to help out. I have not automated the process, or created a robust front-end web site. As you can see from my profile images, I am a data guy.

Once you have a profile, show it off! Does it match your expectations? Do others look at it, and say, "Oh yeah, that's you!"

I hope to be collecting project write-ups, and I will be expanding the job description database I have, so the visualizations should change over time as more data is added.

Consider this an experiment for the moment.Could it be more than that?

You decide.