Plan of action

There was no real plan of action as such, it really just started with a basic desire to write something more incisive, comprehensive and useful than any other CV book on the market.

I had read a few other CV books previously, and none of these seemed very exciting. Not only that, to my mind they all seemed rather dull, and just regurgitated the same basic information. When I looked closer at the information they were disseminating I also noticed that quite a lot of it was actually flawed. I came to the conclusion that many people who follow the advice from standard CV books could actually be doing their job prospects more harm than good, and especially if they just blindly copy examples/templates, as many jobseekers unwittingly do.

I also wondered why some other books paint highly unrealistic rose tinted pictures of writing the perfect CV in just 10 minutes flat, whilst giving out advice which is flawed, untrue and/or potentially counter-productive.

Looking at some of the biographies I saw that a surprisingly high proportion of CV book authors, don’t even write CVs for a living. This explained a lot, and I began to understand why some CV book authors don’t realise why their advice is impractical or just won’t work if they put it into practice – if they worked day in, day out writing CVs professionally they would soon see that for themselves.

Anyway, going back to my plan of action – if you can call it that…
As with any form of writing, I basically started with a blank page, but instead of writing a structure for the book, I simply started with a few main objectives. I wanted my CV book to be;

More Comprehensive
More Engaging
More Entertaining
More Original
More Useful
More Honest/Truthful
Far Better

than typical CV books.

Just a few words, but highly significant, and these few words shaped the whole book.