You haven’t changed. Why does your CV have to?

Apply for three different opportunities and you’ll probably be advised to create three different versions of your CV.

Highlight different achievements. Change the language. Reorder your experience. Make yourself look like the person each employer is searching for.

But you’re still the same person.

Your strengths haven’t changed. Your experience hasn’t changed. The evidence of what you can do hasn’t changed.

Only the opportunity has.

For someone starting their career, the challenge may be showing capability developed through education, projects or volunteering. For someone changing direction, it may be helping an employer recognise how their experience could be useful in a different setting. And for someone with decades of experience, it may be deciding which parts of a long and varied working life can possibly fit onto two pages.

These are different circumstances, but they raise the same question.

How do we help other people understand what someone can do, without repeatedly reducing them to a job title or a tailored CV?

Imagine an experienced professional who has spent years leading technology teams, delivering change, developing products and helping other people grow.

They might reasonably be interested in several different kinds of opportunity.

An organisation looking for a technology executive may be interested in their experience building teams, developing strategy and delivering complex programmes.

A charity recruiting a trustee may place greater emphasis on governance, risk, strategic judgement and the ability to challenge constructively.

Someone looking for a mentor may care most about their experience developing others, asking useful questions and helping people navigate difficult decisions.

The same person could potentially contribute in all three situations.

But the evidence that matters most is different.

This isn’t about creating three professional identities. It’s about understanding the same person from three different perspectives.

And the principle applies well beyond experienced professionals.

A graduate who has organised events, completed substantial projects and contributed to a student society may have evidence relevant to several different occupations.

Someone changing careers may have developed capabilities in one industry that are valuable in another, even when the job titles bear little resemblance.

The person remains the same. The relevance of their experience changes with the opportunity.

What if, instead of continually rewriting our CVs, we could develop one rich, evolving record of our strengths, experience and evidence, allowing the most relevant parts to come forward when needed?

That would give us a more complete picture of what someone can do, without asking them to reinvent themselves for every opportunity.

Job titles, qualifications, employers and years of experience are useful signals.

They provide context. They help us understand where someone has worked, what they’ve studied and the kinds of responsibilities they may have held.

But they are not the same as capability.

Two people with the same job title may have very different strengths and experience. Someone without a particular qualification may have developed relevant capability through practical work. And someone who has spent years in one industry may have skills and judgement that could be valuable elsewhere.

To understand capability, we need to look more closely at the evidence.

There are three useful distinctions.

Capability: What someone is able to do.

Evidence: What their experience, actions and outcomes tell us about that capability.

Relevance: Why that capability might matter in a particular situation.

Evidence might come from employment, education, projects, volunteering, entrepreneurship or other meaningful activity.

It could be something someone created, a problem they helped solve, an improvement they introduced, a decision they made or feedback from people who experienced their work.

Not every valuable contribution produces a measurable financial result. Sometimes the evidence lies in how someone handled uncertainty, brought people together or helped an organisation make a difficult decision.

Evidence also needs interpretation.

A successful project doesn’t automatically prove that everyone involved demonstrated the same capability. Equally, a project that didn’t achieve its intended outcome may still reveal considerable skill, judgement and learning.

The important thing is to understand what someone actually contributed and what that experience suggests about their ability to contribute again.

A claim tells someone what you believe you can do. Evidence gives them a reason to believe it.

Most people have more evidence of capability than they realise.

The difficulty is often recognising it and explaining it clearly.

We tend to describe our experience through responsibilities.

“I managed a team.”

“I worked on a marketing campaign.”

“I helped deliver a new system.”

These statements provide some context, but leave important questions unanswered.

What was happening? What did you actually do? What changed because you were involved?

A useful way to explain an experience is through three elements.

The Situation

What problem needed solving or opportunity was being pursued?

Provide enough context for someone unfamiliar with the work to understand why it mattered.

Your Contribution

What did you do?

Explain your role, the decisions you made and how you approached the challenge. Where other people were involved, distinguish your contribution from the wider team’s work.

The Outcome

What happened?

Describe what changed, what was achieved and what you learnt. Use meaningful numbers where they’re available, but don’t invent measures or exaggerate the result.

For example, someone might initially describe their experience as:

“I helped organise a university careers event.”

That tells us very little.

A more useful explanation might be:

“Our student society wanted to attract more people to its careers events. I worked with three other committee members to redesign the programme, approach guest speakers and promote the event through student networks. We attracted a wider range of attendees and used their feedback to improve the next event.”

That gives someone a better understanding of the situation, the person’s contribution and the outcome.

It also provides a starting point for a conversation about communication, organisation, initiative and collaboration.

It doesn’t establish that the person is an experienced marketing professional or event manager.

But it offers evidence of capabilities that may be relevant to those occupations.

The purpose isn’t to make ordinary experience sound extraordinary. It’s to make your contribution understandable.

You don’t need to reconstruct your entire working life to begin building a clearer picture of your capability.

Start with one experience.

Choose something you’ve done that demonstrates a capability you believe could be useful elsewhere.

It might come from employment, education, volunteering, a project, a personal initiative or another meaningful activity.

Then work through four questions.

1. What was the situation?

What were you trying to achieve? What problem needed solving? Why did it matter?

2. What was my contribution?

What did you actually do? What decisions did you make? What challenges did you help overcome?

3. What happened?

What changed as a result? What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

4. What does this suggest about my capability?

Think about the strengths, skills and judgement your contribution demonstrates.

Be specific, but be realistic. One successful experience doesn’t necessarily establish expertise, and an unsuccessful outcome doesn’t mean you learnt nothing.

The aim is to produce one clear example that another person could understand and explore.

Then choose another experience and repeat the process.

Over time, you’ll begin to develop a richer picture of what you can do, supported by evidence rather than claims.

And as you gain new experience, that picture can continue to grow.

Employers face the other side of this challenge.

When creating an opportunity, they need to understand what someone must be capable of doing to succeed.

A job title or a familiar career history can provide useful clues. In some occupations, specific qualifications, professional standards or previous experience are essential.

But relying too heavily on familiar labels can also mean overlooking people whose relevant capability has been developed elsewhere.

Imagine an organisation looking for someone to lead a complex change programme.

Rather than starting with a list of job titles and years of experience, it could begin by asking what capability the work actually requires.

Perhaps the person needs to understand complicated problems, bring people together, manage uncertainty, make difficult decisions and deliver meaningful outcomes.

The next question becomes:

What evidence would help us understand whether someone could do that work?

That evidence might come from a conventional career in change management. But it might also come from other roles, industries or projects where similar capabilities have been demonstrated.

This doesn’t remove the need for assessment or human judgement. It gives employers a better starting point for deciding whom they should talk to.

At Matchez, we’re building an approach based on that principle.

Rather than asking candidates to continually rewrite their CVs, we encourage them to develop a richer Showcase of their strengths, evidence and interests.

Different opportunities can then be considered through different views of the same underlying person.

But making capability understandable is only part of the challenge.

The next question is how that capability connects with the people and organisations who might value it.

CONNECT: Find the Right Opportunities

How can people and opportunities discover one another, understand why they might belong together and decide whether a conversation is worthwhile?

Explore how capability connects with opportunity →