19/08/2026
Ever so often, someone will ask: "But you don't have an HR background. How did you end up building a career writing CVs? "
The short answer is that I never approached CVs as an HR exercise.
I came to the work through English Literature, Social Anthropology, research, writing, institutional work and entrepreneurship.
Looking back, I think that combination explains quite a lot about how I work.
A CV is usually treated as a record of a career. I have always found it more interesting to view it as a vehicle for interpretation.
What exactly do I mean by that?
Someone can have fifteen years of excellent experience and still produce a rather unconvincing CV. Not because they haven't done enough, but because they are usually the least objective person to write about their own career.
They know every job they have held. They know every responsibility. They remember the meetings, the projects, the difficulties and the small details that mattered at the time.
But they don't necessarily know which parts of all that matter to the person reading the CV.
That's where I come in.
I read careers for patterns.
What does this person keep getting trusted with?
What looks like a collection of unrelated jobs but is actually one career developing in an unexpected direction?
And, sometimes, what has someone spent twenty years doing without realising that it is their strongest professional story?
This is where my background in literature and anthropology has been surprisingly useful.
Literature teaches you to pay attention to structure, language, omissions and what sits beneath the obvious.
Anthropology teaches you to ask different questions about context: why does this achievement matter here? What does this institution actually value? What counts as expertise in this particular world?
Over twelve years, that has taken me well beyond CVs and into LinkedIn profiles, leadership profiles, proposals, websites, speeches, white papers, thought leadership and helping people make sense of non-linear careers.
And the journey has been revelatory as well as rewarding.
I've learnt that careers rarely make as much sense from the inside as they do when you step back and look at the whole thing.
I've learnt that some of the most interesting professional stories are the ones that don't fit neatly into a template.
And I've learnt that very often, the person sitting across from me already has the material for a compelling professional story.
They just haven't had the distance to see it yet.
