Rahul can recite his CV from memory. Fourteen years compressed into two pages. Company names. Titles. Achievements quantified in percentages and revenue figures. He updates it every six months whether he’s job-hunting or not. It is the most maintained document in his life.
Ask him what he’s good at and he’ll list his CV. Ask him what he wants and he’ll describe his next title. Ask him who he is professionally apart from the roles he’s held and he’ll pause. The pause is the problem.
The CV is designed to communicate your market value to an employer. It is not designed to communicate your identity to yourself. But over fourteen years of treating the CV as the primary career document, Rahul has confused the two. He knows what he’s done. He doesn’t know what he is.
Your CV is a receipt. It records transactions. It doesn’t tell you whether the purchases were worth making.
Psychologist Herminia Ibarra’s research on professional identity shows that most career transitions fail not because of skill gaps but because of identity gaps. People don’t know who they are becoming. They only know who they’ve been. The CV reinforces backward-looking identity by structuring your professional story as a chronological list of things that already happened. It gives you no vocabulary for the person you’re trying to become.
The trap is specific. The more impressive the CV, the harder it is to look past it. Rahul has worked at three companies that anyone in his industry would recognise. Those logos function as identity anchors. Leaving them behind doesn’t just mean changing jobs. It means releasing a version of himself that other people already accept and admire.
In Indian professional culture the CV carries additional weight. It is the document your parents show relatives. It is the thing that gets read aloud at family gatherings. “He’s at TCS” or “she’s a VP at Deloitte” are not just career updates. They are social proofs. The CV isn’t just yours. It belongs to the family narrative. Rewriting it means renegotiating the story.
Rahul recently tried an exercise: describe your professional identity without mentioning any company name or title. He managed two sentences before defaulting back to the CV. The two sentences were more honest than the two pages. They were also harder to say out loud.
If you couldn’t use your job title or company name, how would you describe what you do and why it matters?
Rahul can recite his CV from memory. He can’t describe himself without it. Can you? careers.deliberx.com