I’ve just had an email from a good friend. She’s an extremely creative event designer and decorator in the hospitality industry and she’s looking for a new job. She asked for my advice on her CV. I reworked it for her – pulling out the important messages and making sure they were clear, upfront and highlighted. I reformatted it to make it easy to read and gave the wording a quick polish. Her experience all stacks up; the CV is looking pretty good.
I also gave her some advice (I just can’t help myself these days); I’m pretty sure it will make a real difference to her job search (and hope she appreciates it!). My advice is this:
“To prove how passionate and knowledgeable you are in your field, how about setting up your own blog? Your posts could be photos of design ideas you like, recent events you are proud of or just visual elements that inspire you.
A blog like this is a great way to record your ideas for posterity and build a bit of an archive to remember for your next project. It’s also a fantastic way to prove your expertise and interest in your work, something that I’m sure would really wow a potential employer.”
My talented web designer friend and associate Iain Claridge does exactly that – he collects and posts image of design ideas that inspire him on his brilliant design blog:
- Check out Iain’s design blog – http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/
Iain set this up originally as a personal ‘brain dump’ for ideas: a repository for snippets of code and chunks of creative inspiration that he found whilst browsing the internet – important information that would otherwise be lost. The fact that others would find it equally useful as a source of information and inspiration was a bit of a surprise for him.
Iain’s blog is now recognised as one of the best design blogs around, with 78,000 unique visitors every month and an incredible 12,417 inbound links. It has been featured in design blogs such as grafik, surfstation and siteinspire and won Iain numerous design assignments – most notably from NASA!
Iain’s blog is a perfect example of the approach I teach my business clients – get your passion out there, prove your expertise and commitment by producing some really ‘valuable content’. It’s a superb way to show a potential employer or customer that you are serious, knowledgeable and committed to what you do.
Valuable content works.
This is such a great idea, Sonja – would work brilliantly in the creative field as an ever-growing portfolio. I love the term “brain-dump”, too – makes perfect sense. x
Today I met a very talented young writer with a passion for the music industry. He runs a first class music blog site but wants to get more business doing PR and writing for bands. It’s hard work – I guess bands/managers get a whole heap of sales letters begging for an opportunity doing this. How do you stand out? My suggestion: set up a blog based website specifically for your PR/writing business. Don’t just tell people you do this stuff – show people. Write articles on how bands can get attention, promote their events. Offer something tangible – setting up and writing and running a blog for bands? Just a thought. Hope it helps.