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Ben Hong
Ben Hong

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Going Beyond the One Dimensional Resume

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

A common question asked of children. Yet when we think about it, while it seems like a mere innocent question, the question is framed in a way that really is more accurately represented as:

"What is the one thing you want to be for a large portion of your life?"

We are more than our jobs

The truth is, we are more than our jobs. After all, in addition to working, we are often in pursuit of other things that make us unique and interesting (even if we might not think so).

In other words, though it may not seem that way at first glance, merely representing ourselves by our jobs presents us as one-dimensional. When in reality, our jobs often don't even begin to illustrate the rich tapestry that is our lives.

And though I've struggled with finding a way to illustrate this through resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and so forth, I wasn't able to do this properly until Polywork.

Show off all the cool things you do

When it comes to most professional resumes and profiles, you're often limited to singling out your job as the most important thing during a timeline. Yet, with Polywork, I'm able to show not only what my job is, but other activities as well.

This means that in addition to the standard boilerplate description of what one would expect a software engineer to have, I can illustrate other activities that make me unique such as:

  • Creating courses on various platforms
  • Speaking at conferences around the world
  • Teaching workshops to people of varying skill levels
  • Contributing to and maintaining a popular open source library

And those are just the activities related to my professional growth and development. If I had been using Polywork back in my go (i.e., baduk or weiqi) playing days, I would have loved to post all my go adventures and blog posts!

Looking towards the future

The best thing about all of this is that this is just the beginning! There are many more features that Polywork has planned and they've got a proven track record with listening to what the community needs. In fact, I've loved the work so much that I even joined as a Polynaut Advisor!

Anyhow, if you'd like to check it out, [sign up here] and use the VIP code bencodezen!

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