I subscribe to the philosophy that it’s a good idea to keep your résumé up-to-date at all times — in any economy and in any job situation. If you’re now employed in a “stable job” you might think this article isn’t for you, but trust me, it is.

My reasons for this recommendation are many.

• If you are now employed at a “stable” job, you still have reviews (sometimes annually). Keeping your résumé up-to-date can help your current employer recognize your value, and might get you a bigger raise — or help you keep your job in a down-economy.
• If you happen to find yourself laid off, instead of spending the first few days of your unemployment getting your résumé put together, you can instead jump right into looking for and apply at jobs. If you were part of a bigger lay-off, these few days could give you a head-start over all the others who are applying from your former employer.
• You never know who might be looking for someone with your skill-set. Having an up-to-date, published résumé could land you a job you weren’t even looking for.

Of course, the list could go on, but I’ll leave it at that.

Switching from background to the purpose of this article…

It is a pain to keep your résumé up-to-date. These days you need an online résumé, a PDF version of your résumé, and sometimes even a Word Doc version of your résumé. Updating three separate documents is inefficient and can lead to errors or omissions — neither is good for your résumé.

To remedy that I selected a résumé hosting service called VisualCV. For those who don’t know, CV stands for Curriculum Vitae. A résumé should be one page (at most, two pages) and serves as a brief summary of your skills, experience, and education. A Curriculum Vitae is longer (at least two page), and gives more detail.

I feel that you should keep your CV up-to-date, and use that as your “generic résumé”. You can then use that document to pick and choose items to include in a résumé that you craft specifically for a particular position that you’re applying for.

Back to VisualCV…

Essentially, VisualCV is a content management and analytics service for your CV. You can input your data into a single-source, then view that data in multiple formats. You can also give a link to your CV and see how many people are viewing it, and sometimes even who they are. Very cool.

… unless they go out-of-business.

We regret to inform you that the VisualCV.com website will be ceasing operations, effective December 30, 2011.

Since our launch almost four years ago we’ve been gratified by the response to VisualCV, and how it has enabled thousands of professionals to better represent themselves online. Even more importantly we have been delighted to see VisualCV help people secure significant new career positions. However, we have been unable to turn the site into a viable, self-supporting business and therefore we reluctantly made this decision.

We recognize that many of you need time to recover your resume data from VisualCV — which is why we are providing you with thirty days’ notice. We recommend saving a PDF copy of your current VisualCV. You can easily do this by clicking on the button on the bottom of the page you see when viewing or editing your VisualCV. We also recommend you separately save any images, videos or documents in your portfolio that you do not currently have stored somewhere else.

To ensure we meet all our members’ privacy concerns, we will destroy all user data once website operations have ceased. This includes any and all backups we have. As a result, once the deadline has passed it will not be possible for us to recover any member data. You can be assured that we will not be providing any user data to third parties of any kind.

We will be contacting the small number of paying customers that still have active subscriptions to arrange a prorated refund for the months remaining on their annual subscription.

Thank you for all your support over the past four years. We wish you well in your future career endeavors.

Best Regards,
The VisualCV Team

So, if you’re like me and have your résumé on VisualCV.com, you need to go and get all the content that you want off the service before it’s turned off in just over a week.

I’m re-writing my CV on my site using HTML5 and Microformats. Once it’s done you’ll be able to view my résumé here. It’s now under construction, and doesn’t look like much, but the data is all there, which is the important part (it would be a pain to try to re-create the data).