T1 Profile.

Although, for the moment, your future career ideas may be as unclear as the swimmingpool water in the picture, there WILL come a moment when dreams and hopes (not to mention all your hard work!) will bear fruit and you will hear the words:

« Congratulations, we are delighted to tell you that we are all agreed that the position/post is yours ».

Then you take a very deep breath and hope or pray quietly (or both!) that you can deliver all you have promised at interview!!!

You watch the days running down and you start work.

You encounter your boss at the coffee machine / water fountain in your first week and he says: « Hi there.  You’ll remember me – I’m the one who recruited you!  Welcome to the company.  Call me Dave! »  Then a few seconds later he continues:

« Ah, meant to ask… can you do something for me?  We need a profile of you to put on our website and in our corproate magazine – 2 x full pages A4, 12pt with photo/s.  It needs to be an informal mix of the personal and the professional – we’ve already had your CV, but we need our staff and clients to get to know you: the person you are – and you are more than a list of events and dates (at least we sincerely hope you are given we’ve recruited you!).  Of course, as our corporate language is English, it needs to be written in this language.  Make sure you check it and use spell-check, WordReference and Grammarly – what you present will be what we upload and print!  So make it good – make it as perfect as possible!  It has to be Print and Web-ready – no-one is going to edit this for you!« 

INSTRUCTION: create (on two full pages of A4, typed in 12pt and printed with photos  (but not more than 25% of the space occupied by photos) a personal/professional profile according to the boss’ instructions/request above.   This needs to show your identity and personality (character, sense of humour, interests etc) so that people will know who you are and want to get to know you as colleague or contact. Remember this isn’t just about the words, it is about impact on the page and screen: it needs to have the ‘wow factor‘

NB. DeepL, Google Translate, AI and other such tools are NOT permitted because they represent plagiarism.  Spell-check, Grammarly, WordReference and dictionaries are fine because they do not write something for you, they merely help you to ‘finesse’ what you have yourself written.

This is NOT as easy as you might think!  It is not a history lesson, nor merely a list of events, studies and qualifications nor a re-hash of your cv/résumé.  It is not  ‘formal’ document.  You need to learn to strike a professional yet informal tone…. and all in your best English as the company you are working for is international and has English as its corporately-adopted language.  (NB. No-one will correct your English – what you produce gets printed/put online – if you want to be proud of it, it had better be good!).  It’s the first impression people will have of you, and as you well know, first impressions are lasting impressions!

You MUST therefore use spellcheck, WordReference, Grammarly and some really close proof-reading to ensure that you avoid major, unforgiveable errors. … not to mention the wrath of your boss!

FINAL IMPORTANT TIP: when you have worked on-screen and checked using spell-check and Grammarly, then you need to proof read (relecture). May I STRONGLY RECOMMEND that you read your work out loud. It may sound stupid, but it helps enormously.  You will find more errors with your ears than you will with your eyes:

• if you find yourself stumbling in your reading, it may be because of poor punctuation (you are following your own punctuation marks but it doesn’t sound right even to you) – you can correct it.

• you may find you can read it, but even you are not exactly sure what it means – you can improve your expression

• you will hear repetitions – if every sentence seems to start with ‘I’, even you will be getting bored – find another way of saying it.  Same goes for words or phrases that repeat in the same sentence: the first one will still be echoing off the walls while you repeat and re-repeat!  Use Word Reference to find synonyms! [The only legitimate reason for repetition is to dramatically accentuate and reinforce for effect.  Repetition which is NOT done for this reason will be received as ‘lazy’ – a conclusion you most certainly do NOT want your readers to draw.

• If you are finding even you can’t follow your own work because it doesn’t appear to have good structure or paragraphing – work at changing it!

Finally just hold the pages in front of you.  Don’t read them – just let your eyes rove over the sheets. Is there a ‘WoW’ (hey – that looks great!) factor?   If even you can’t see it, then the reader certainly won’t.  So get to work and get the ‘WoW!’

Over to you!

This is a sort of ‘test-run’ for the production of a covering letter and CV.  

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