Using the Golden Circle Model in your resume and LinkedIn profile

The last three years I worked as a (senior) business consultant and information architect at software company Be Informed in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. We worked on an amazing product, a ground breaking model-driven business process platform. And my job was to explain the possibilities of this platform to various audiences.
The Be Free program, which I launched in September 2013 was a marketing campaign that targeted on making a wider group of people familiar with the product. The campaign was a great success and I had the feeling that I was really helping people in proving their ideas to their customers and managers. But the interaction was on-line and from a distance, never close enough to really understand their business goals and issues. 

The sudden end of my contract with Be Informed, forced me to rethink my professional goals and ambitions. What do I really want? Do I want to be a product marketer, focused on 'pushing' a product? Or do I want to be a business consultant, closer to the business and working with a customer - really helping a customer - to improve a company's agility, efficiency and results?

The Golden Circle Model

With this question in mind I looked at my LinkedIn profile, finding out that it was merely a summary of all the things that I had done in the past. A long summary of 'What' items with sometimes a short phrase about the 'How'. Never a 'Why'.

This reminded me of one of the discussions I had a couple of weeks ago, about the Golden Circle Model. This video explains the principles of it:

 

Now imagine yourself as a product: a candidate for a new job. Wouldn't it be helpful to use this model for your resume and your LinkedIn profile? I think it does!

Why

So I started with defining my Why:

My professional goal is to enable performance improvements for organizations - and their individual professionals and customers.

This in fact summarizes my professional goal ánd my ambition. I don't have the ambition to become a manager, I can be a project or department manager if it fits within my goal to help organizations and individual professionals and customers, but it is not my goal. My goal is to help people by doing what I do best: translating complex organizational goals and processes to clear and innovative ICT Solutions and making knowledge applicable.

How

Well, describing the How can be a bit tricky, because it is easy to mistake the How for the What. Here you want to explain how you want to reach that professional goal. What makes you the person to do this. In my profile I ended up with this:

I do so by translating complex organizational goals and processes to clear and innovative ICT solutions and making knowledge applicable.

What

The What is often not a problem, our resumes are full of this kind of information. The trick is to keep it short:

With workshops and moderation sessions I can transform implicit knowledge into explicit, usable knowledge. By using mock-ups and prototypes I can demonstrate my progress and gather feedback.
I find a lot of pleasure in going through the whole process from a first analysis of a situation, sketching a creative solution, presenting and demonstrating prototypes and results, explaining people how to work with it and making users enthusiastic about the final product. This is what I do best.

Does it work?

Well, see for your self: nl.linkedin.com/in/cvanmansom/

In the first day after updating my LinkedIn profile I noticed an increase in the number of people that opened my profile. This could be a good indication that my strategy worked.
But more important than this, is the fact that for the first time in my career I wrote down in three steps who I am, what I do and how I do it. I now have the red line that I needed to address possible job opportunities in the right way. Please wish me luck in finding one ;-). 


Comments

SourKing said…
Hello Guys,

Do you know how important is CV? CV is the main paper about yourself. If your cv isn't good or professional you can't get your dream job. So for getting the best job you must make your CV professional. If you want to know how to make the CV professional check out my site here CV
January 10, 2019 at 5:20 PM
Digital Marketing said…
Boost your B2B marketing efforts with our Comprehensive LinkedIn Advertising Management service. We handle everything from ad creation and audience targeting to campaign optimization and performance analysis. Leveraging LinkedIn’s professional network, we ensure your ads reach decision-makers and key influencers, driving higher-quality leads and enhancing your brand’s visibility among industry professionals.

Read more: LinkedIn Marketing
May 14, 2024 at 8:47 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improve Product and Brand engagement through smart documentation - A White Paper about the challenge of creating user-centric documentation

Image
For most product manufacturers, delivering adequate documentation is a constant challenge. The increasing complexity of products and the stricter regulations for product documentation often lead to extensive documentation sets with 500+ pages manuals on-line or in print. The question is: how effective is all this documentation? Smart, user-centric documentation Users can be overwhelmed by long, jargon-loaded user manuals, and frustrated by a lack of clear answers. When customers don’t find a solution, blame inevitably falls on the product and the company. Bad documentation - incomplete, unclear, out of date - creates a negative engagement with products and brands. Figure 1. Smarter documentation asks users what they need to know Smart documentation leads users to success and satisfaction. These are the users who share their positive experience with family and friends, and convince them to become customers in turn. Using semantic technology, we can create the smart document
Read more

Laying the foundation for an effective article

Image
In this series of articles you can follow my process in writing a new article on Robotics. In the  first episode  I explained my approach towards writing, the  second article  focussed on setting the goal, choosing an audience and finding the right approach. Now that we have a clear vision on goal, audience and approach, it is time to start setting up the structure. Writing requires a structured approach Writing is all about structuring your thoughts. And although this is a process that most of us do in a more implicit way, it sometimes helps - and is actually best practice - to write down your structure on a very high level. The goal of my article is to change the opinion of the reader towards accepting Robotics as a something that brings value to a business and motivates employees, rather than being limited to reducing FTE. So the structure of my article should be build up around the motives used to build up this case. As I want my article to be short and sharp, I don't
Read more