Ghilaine Chan: job titles and your career history

I have been asked a few times recently to give my career history. Either as a presentation to a room full of people or as part of an interview. This always makes me stop in my tracks as I worry about whether I remember my previous job titles and career history correctly or not.

I pride myself on being pretty open about the things that I am willing to share and the fact that I'm honest about them when I share them, but they are still my truth and I may remember them very differently from the people who employed or worked with me. In this world of social media where everything is out there to see, how do you manage that for yourself?

The reason I write this post is that I went to an event a while back and a chap sitting next to me mentioned that he worked with one of the entrepreneurs who was pitching. After the pitch he started to talk about the fact that the job title she had when he employed her was not what was on the slide. In my opinion, it didn't matter too much as I couldn't see a significant difference between the two, but for her, it really mattered.

I didn't say much as I couldn’t comment either way, but it got me thinking about how people view their job titles, how they view their job roles and how they feel that the difference between those two things affects their ability to get to where they want to go.

Is it wrong to lie about your job title and career history?

This is not about downright lying, but about those small adjustments we make. There is also the added issue of job titles that don't make sense as soon as you walk out the door of one company and in through the doors of another. Added to that is the fact that you may have the job title of manager of paperclips when actually what they are asking you to do is along the lines of VP of paperclips. What they call you and what you are able to deliver become two different things. Do you change your job title on your CV?

Only you can decide what situation you find yourself in, but I work on the idea that if anyone I worked with looked at my CV or my LinkedIn profile and saw what I put, they would nod and understand if the job title that I had when I was doing it wasn't to the letter. I will say now, that I benefitted from not really having proper job titles that I made up with my boss as I went and which didn't really make much sense outside the four walls of my team.

Do, however, remember that greatly stretching the truth isn't a good thing - putting president of paperclips when you were only a paperclip assistant will come back to bite you!

Find out more about our guest blogger Ghilaine Chan

Ghilaine is passionate about allowing people to do their best work and delight others Ghilaine helps people to operate fast growing businesses in a productive and streamlined way, keeping an eye on time and money, whilst increasing motivation and improving customer relationships in a fast paced, changing environment. She brings order to chaos and creates scalable processes around the business, empowering them to delight their customers. She works with tech based or enabled companies who are looking to disrupt their industries, but know that people are at the centre of their success and helping them manage their teams to:

• Do their best work and delighting others
• Create some boundaries, but not cages
• Know they are acting for a purpose
• Determine which part they play, that what they receive enables them and what they produce is useful
• Have autonomy over how and when they produce

She has over 15 years' experience in scaling international business functions for technology companies, within their support and consultancy organisations. Ghilaine is a graduate of London College of Fashion (now part of University of the Arts: London) with a degree in Product Development. She is a Mentor with Microsoft Ventures,UpRising and Outbox Incubator as well as an Approved Business Coach with Growth Accelerator, now part of Business Growth Services.

Want to know more? Connect with Ghilaine on LinkedIn, follow her on Twitter and visit her website, Ghilaine & Co.