Maybe single-sourcing seems like one of those things that you can’t get into unless you’re working in a certain sort of place, creating certain sorts of documentation. If you feel that single-sourcing is important to learn about, but your work doesn’t provide any opportunities to explore it, what can you do?

Anyone who has looked for work has already worked with a document that, surprisingly, lends itself quite well to single-sourcing: your résumé. After all, the core of single-sourcing is producing multiple outputs from a single source, and who among us hasn’t heard that we need to customize our résumé for each job we apply to? One source, multiple outputs, is what we need.

Not only can working with a résumé help you learn the basics of single sourcing, but learning the principles of single-sourcing can, in turn, teach you about effectively writing and customizing your résumé.

A fundamental of single-sourcing is, as the name indicates, creating a single source for documentation that needs to be rendered in different forms to satisfy the needs of different audiences.

To build our résumé, we start by putting everything that we could possibly say about ourselves to an employer into a single source, then output selected pieces of that content into specific instances of our résumé that we use when applying for specific jobs. Ideally, the content should go straight from the content source to the specific résumé without editing. The content should be written and structured to allow you to do this in a systematic, rather than an ad hoc, fashion.

 

  

We need to “chunk” the content so that certain types of information can be presented or omitted without affecting the presentation of other types of information. If you’re seeking work as, say, a technical illustrator, you want to be able to output only those pieces of the content source that support your application without bringing in other, less relevant, information. Of course, knowing what information is relevant or not is a matter of audience analysis—figuring out what information an employer needs to select a candidate for a given position, and how that information should be presented to the employer.

Various tools and processes can be used to single-source your résumé. For instance, you can create your source content as a word processor template and then simply delete unneeded information from each document you create based on that template. Another approach is to put the content into a database, and then use the report function of the database program to output your résumé. Content source can also be created in help-authoring tools or using on- line résumé tools found at job search sites such as Monster.ca or Job Shark.

Your résumé provides an accessible way to learn the basic principles of single-sourcing: one definitive source made up of modular information. This in turn can make the résumé writing process less time-consuming and more systematic, and can make the resulting résumé easier to navigate and extract information from.

Reprint courtesy of the Toronto Chapter of STC.