Many people have developed a curriculum vitae or resume. There’s a version of these documents I call an “About Me” file that is useful to share with people you’re going to be working with, or would like to work with in the future. It’s different because you’re describing things about your upbringing, interests, and personal style which wouldn’t have a place in a CV or resume.
Your “About Me” file can include these components:
- Title I suggest you name it “About <your name>”
- A professional headshot photo, so people know what you look like
- A narrative about your upbringing, transitioning into important roles and projects you’ve done. Write this as though someone asked you to tell your career story in 2 minutes, no more.
- A section about your personal style, and what comes naturally to you, and professional interests.
- Comments about family, hobbies, things ‘outside’ of work interests.
- Close with key philosophical beliefs and how you see the world.
The whole thing should be less than 1 printed page. You might want two versions of this. One is for internal to your company. You can use acronyms and lingo that will make sense to insiders. The other version is for a general audience, where you consciously excise jargon that won’t make sense.
Set a reminder for yourself to update this every 6 months, or when you have a major role change.
Here is my current About Me file as an example you can follow:
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<Headshot goes here> About Glenn Brooke
I grew up just downriver from the DuPont Washington Works facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia. I earned a B.S. in Biochemistry (CWRU in Cleveland), and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology (Northwestern University in Evanston) researching yeast DNA replication. I ran a software development company focused on solutions for research scientists while I was in grad school.
I joined the Pioneer Research Information Management group in 1993 after a post-doc at Indiana University working on RNA splicing in nematodes. Those were the heady days of the first internet access for employees and bioinformatics was just hitting stride. I helped launch PRISM which integrated lab and field research data and expanded the support organization. I began leading the DuPont Collaboration Center of Competency in October 2011. We finished the move from Lotus Notes to Office 365 and established SharePoint and the “Inside the Oval” intranet platform. In 2015-2017 I led the Enterprise Technology Services Delivery group in Corporate IT, which provided run/maintain for servers, network, databases, data center operations, collaboration tools, ERP infrastructure, application integration, middleware, and device support.
I held an interim assignment to support organizational change efforts for IT for the Corteva division of DowDuPont. This was part of the larger effort to create a new agriculture company from the strengths of three companies coming together.
Currently I am a Sr. Strategic Relationships Manager within Corteva R&D focused on using our world-class R&D capability and scale to drive stronger relationships with third parties – especially focusing on food companies — by solving difficult interdisciplinary problems with them.
Collaboration comes naturally to me and sometimes I’m puzzled about why people don’t share more readily. I enjoy people and getting to know them better. I see human organizations as gardens with diverse plantings, rather than machines with interchangeable parts. I’m an avid reader and learner, and love to share what I’m learning. I’m intrigued with molecular and cellular biology, systems biology, history, geopolitics, etymology of words, biographies, military strategy, leadership, marketing, and exponential technologies. People will attest that I am a good teacher, use an encouragement style of leadership, and am candid about my failings. I’m blessed with a wonderful wife, a son (34) and daughter (32). I’ve published 22 books and information products on several topics and write regularly for multiple websites and LinkedIn.
One of my books is about these five questions, which reflect things I’ve learned from many mentors:
- What problem are we trying to solve? (Or, what problems do we prefer?)
- What are we optimizing for?
- What premium are we willing to pay to get a desired result?
- How does this help our organization?
- How does this help our customer?
