From my earliest days of work, I was warned about an affliction that might threaten my career.
This affliction was known as the hole in the CV or the gap in the résumé.
Anyone who contracted this dreaded disease, I was told, would likely never get a decent job again.
This was taken very seriously. You could find sombre advice in books telling you how to cover up holes in your CV. (You can still find such advice, only now it’s in blogs, not books.)
As a coder in my early twenties, I calculated the consequences of this admonition. If I were to be allowed no gaps in my résumé, then I’d have to spend my entire life working. I’d be coding every day, every year, every decade until I dropped dead.
It was as if I were being warned never to do anything interesting with my life.
So I did what any self-respecting twenty-something would do. I quit. I left my decent job as a coder and didn’t get another one. I wrote a book. I went to Antarctica.
I’ve spent the decades since peppering my CV with as many holes as I possibly can.
ChainedIn
This idea of job after job after job, don’t quit one until you’ve landed another, finish the last job on Friday and start the next one on Monday... well, you’d hope it would have been consigned to history by now.
Instead, it has become entrenched.
Oddly, it’s technology that has entrenched it. Specifically, it’s the technology known as LinkedIn.
Back in the old days, before the web, there was nothing forcing employers to require CVs or employees to submit them. It was just a convention. And conventions can change.
In fervent resistance to the strictures of the résumé, I once applied for a position with an anti-résumé. Instead of listing of job after job after job I’d done, I drew three circles on a sheet of paper, representing what I judged to be the three essential qualities in a candidate for this position. In each circle, I scattered hints of how I met the respective requirement. Admittedly, this was a volunteer position, and my playful approach perfectly matched the playfulness of the role, which involved a mix of education and entertainment. Still, my anti-résumé got me the job.
The most reactionary technology takes conventions and sets them in stone.
That’s what LinkedIn has done with CVs.
Take my LinkedIn profile. It’s a list of job after job after job I’ve done. At the top, it declares that I’m the founder of the Open Web Mind. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. I’m not just a founder: I’m also a writer, and a podcaster, and a YouTuber, and a visualizer, and a woodcarver. I’m not just working on the Open Web Mind: I’m also working on Tangled Web, and The Last Theory, and The Quit Work Project, and things made thinkable, and goodwoodglobes.
LinkedIn doesn’t allow me to be all these things. It requires me to be just one thing.
LinkedIn doesn’t allow anti-résumés with words scattered in circles. It requires a résumé of job after job after job.
LinkedIn has entrenched the idea that your career should be one damned thing after another.
These many things
Technology needn’t be so reactionary.
Indeed, technology has the potential to explode conventions.
If LinkedIn is the technology that entrenches the idea of job after job after job, Polywork is the technology that explodes that convention.
Full disclosure: after I discovered Polywork and used it to find three excellent guests for the last three episodes of Tangled Web (Alexandra Arens, Tarek Madany Mamlouk and Martin Feld), the Polywork team reached out to me and promised me swag if I gave them a shout-out on this podcast.
Don’t tell them, but I’d been planning to do so anyway, because I like technologies that explode conventions.
Instead of requiring you to state one current role, the latest in a list of job after job after job, Polywork allows you to add as many roles as you like. Mine include Founder, Author, Podcaster and Mapmaker.
And not just roles. You can add skills, interests and qualities, too. Mine include Coding, CNC and Self-Taught.
And if your role, skill, interest or quality isn’t on the list, you can just add it. There were no badges for Globemaker or Computational Physics when I joined Polywork. There are now: I added them.
I love this.
Instead of forcing us into pre-defined categories, it allows us to define ourselves in whatever ways we choose.
Instead of forcing each of us to be just one thing, it allows each of us to be the many things we truly are.
This seems obvious, right?
But it changes everything.
LinkedIn may be good for people looking for another job to add to their long lists of job after job after job. But Polywork is good for people who aren’t looking for another job, who are looking instead for others to collaborate with on one of the many things they’re currently working on.
When I was looking for other tech podcasters to talk tech podcasting on Tangled Web, I posted a Podcast guest opportunity, targeting people with the badges Podcaster, Podcast Guest and Tech Enthusiast.
What no holes?
This is the future of work.
At least, I hope it is.
Let’s face it, many of the jobs-for-life we’ve been doing for generations don’t need to be done any more.
To give just one example, the insurance brokers who recently took two months to get me a home insurance quote will soon be replaced by algorithms that can do it in two seconds.
And that’s a good thing.
It’ll free us to do the things the algorithms can’t do: be creative, be inventive, be brilliant, be warm, nurture human relationships, enjoy working lives doing more than just one thing.
The future of work, I hope, is that when someone reaches out to colloborate with you, if they don’t have a résumé that’s full of wrong turns, convoluted routes and unexpected detours, if they don’t have a CV that’s full of holes, then you’ll wonder why they never did anything interesting with their life.
If what I’ve described is the kind of working life you’re interested in, you know where to find me to collaborate: polywork.com/markjeffery.
There, that’s gotta be worth some Polywork swag, right?