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 ;-).