Resume Management for Principals and Project Managers

["Chris Knight" <cknight -at- attcanada -dot- ca>]

Paula Puffer asked:
<<
The marketing manager and I have been talking about our options for
generating resumes on the fly. For proposals, we need to target the
resumes for either the person's title on the project, or the type work
the project involved. Right now the resumes are generated by hand and we
take the blurbs from previous proposals (something the marketing manager
and I both want to get away from) and edit
We've talked about building a database for doing this.
Do any of you have other suggestions for managing this process?
>>

XML.

You are on the right track with the database concept.
Based on what you have said,  a database of resumes might look something
like this:

<RESUME>
  <NAME>Engineer's Name<NAME>
  <PROJECT>
    <PROJ_ID>An identifier for the project, unique in the database</PROJ_ID>
    <TITLE>One of a set of predefined job titles</TITLE>
    <PROJ_TYPE>One of a set of predefined project types</PROJ_TYPE>
  </PROJECT>
  .
  . more projects
  .
</RESUME>
.
. more resumes
.

You could decide to add more fields to a PROJECT, such as SUPERVISOR, etc.
The PROJ_ID would allow you to link to a record in a project database, where
each project had fields like CLIENT, DATE_STARTED, DATE_COMPLETED, etc.
Whatever you wanted.

You would need a DTD to specify the database structure, including all the
titles and project types.
You would have to write a program to maintain the database and to extract
and merge records from the database to some suitable output format. You
could stick with XML plus a XSL-compatible stylesheet (same as CSS) to
control presentation (in a browser), onscreen and printed. But the output
format would actually depend on how you present proposals to potential
clients. You probably want to merge the output from the resume database into
some larger document.
Come to think of it, you might want to start building proposals totally from
such databases, including boiler-plate text stored as a database.

This is all possible today, although not routine. It would be a challenge,
but I would certainly head in this direction.

Chris
_____________________________________
Christopher Knight, Technical Communicator
http://members.attcanada.ca/~cknight/
E-mail: cknight -at- attcanada -dot- ca
Phone: (604) 877-0074



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