Career storytelling is a structured professional development service that helps you make sense of your career and produces a full suite of professional documents – CV, LinkedIn profile, biographies and more – that reflect a clear, authentic story about who you are at work.
It starts with a conversation about your professional history, values, strengths and direction, followed by a set of carefully written documents that commit that thinking to writing, and then a period of collaboration where we refine the documents together. The conversation does the thinking work; the documents make it real.
This approach exists because two traditional career support services leave a gap:
- CV writing views documents purely functional: a series of rules and best practices to appeal to ATS, recruiters and hiring managers.
- Career coaching sees professional development as a long-term journey of questioning and self-discovery, continually evolving your sense of self.
Storytelling sees written documents not as a job search utility, but as an act of expression and authentic articulation. Additionally, it’s not purely dealing in concepts and self-beliefs, but about finding the words for the ideas you hold about yourself and committing them to paper. By inhabiting the space between these two traditional disciplines, storytelling does something completely new, and provides a unique way to both make sense of your own career and commit it to words and formats that resonate with others.
Full process timelines for each of my packages can be found here.
Who is it for?
Career storytelling works well for people who:
- Are accomplished but feel their current documents don’t accurately reflect who they are
- Have a sense that their career has drifted, and want to take more deliberate ownership of it
- Are preparing for a significant career move and want to show up as themselves
- Value quality and depth over “good enough” in their professional presentation
- Treat their career as something worth investing in, rather than something to manage in moments of crisis
It tends not to be the right fit for people in urgent job search situations who need a fast turnaround, or for people looking primarily for direction and decision-making support rather than written output.
What isn’t it?
Career storytelling sits between several adjacent services, and it’s worth being clear about the distinctions.
It’s not standard CV writing. CV writers focus on optimising a single document to win interviews. It’s usually a process of established templates, keyword strategies and recruiter-friendly formatting. Career storytelling produces a CV, but the CV is a by-product of a broader process. CV writing is about landing another role fast. Career storytelling is about positioning for opportunities aligned to your values.
It’s not career coaching. Career coaches help you decide what to do next by exploring direction, working through obstacles, and supporting transitions. Career storytelling doesn’t do that. It assumes you have some sense of who you are and what you want – even if that isn’t totally defined yet – and helps you put it into words. The coaching in this process is incidental to the writing, not the other way around.
It’s not personal branding, as that phrase is usually used. Personal branding is typically about constructing a polished, marketable version of yourself for external consumption. Career storytelling works the other way: it tries to find the most accurate words for who you already are. Where most personal branding starts with the destination and works backwards, storytelling starts with you and works out, so your “personal brand” comes from you, not what others want you to be.
Can career storytelling help me?
To see the work in practice, you can find case studies here and here.
To discuss how we might work together on your career story, you can schedule a call here.
