I think I know where I'm going wrong in this job hunting. I'm branding mysefl wrong.
I'm a techie. I love technology. One of my favourite technologies to get stuff done is Perl (obviously).
And that's what my CV (or "resume") emphasises. It's all "Dave the Perl Geek" and "look at all the really cool stuff I've done with Perl".
In the past this has worked fine, but the marketplace is changing. Has changed. The people who are making decisions on whether to interview me and hire me aren't geeks. They aren't interested in the technology. They aren't at all impressed by silly Perl tricks like Symbol::Approx::Sub or Tie::Hash::Cannabinol. The want to know what value I can add to their business. And I need to be able to tell them that in "PHB-speak".
So I've been thinking about it. and luckily there is another strand to my career that I can emphasise. I've been dealing with data for all of my career. When I first started out I was writing the data modelling part of a CASE tool[1] (ah... who remembers CASE tools?), then I got into database design and database tuning for many years, I did a bit of data warehousing and data mining, and now I'm a data munger.
So with a little tweaking of the CV tomorrow we'll say goodbye to Dave the Perl Geek and a big hello to Dave the Data Expert. Using state of the art data manipulation techniques, Dave can ensure that you are getting the full business value out of your enterprise data.
It's a craxy idea, but it just might work :)
[1] LBMS Systems Engineer if anyone's interested.
Remember, the resume (I still think it's not the same as a CV) is just the package, it's not the contents. It has to get people interested enough to call you. Don't put lies on it, but describe things in terms that your intended audience can understand.
