Vizualize.Me public beta goes live

A couple of months ago I posted an article titled Vizualize.Me - your CV as an infographic in a single click, regarding an interesting new visualisation service which, using data from your LinkedIn profile can generate an entire, graphical representation of your CV in a single click.  At the time of writing the post, the service was gearing up to launch their private beta, with a public beta soon to follow.  Unfortunately, I didn’t quite make the cut for the private beta but the public beta is now live!  So, I’ve been straight in and created a visualisation of my CV (below) from my LinkedIn profile.

As you can see from the picture, it’s not quite the whole thing (click through to view live) but the visualisation process takes your education and employment history and generates a colourful looking timeline, complete with mouse-over job descriptions.  Scroll further down the page and you’ll see some nice bar charts summarising skills, complete with star rating - oddly on a 4 star system? - to indicate proficiency (you can tell I’m a modest sort by how I rate myself) and any recommendations from LinkedIn.  Finally, bringing up the rear, we have links to the company website and any other online presence you may have associated with LinkedIn.

While it generates a rather striking looking page, I’m still not sure if I’d ever send this to a prospective employer in place of my standard CV.  While it definitely stands out from the crowd (perhaps too much so), some may consider it to be rather garish and flashy (which may be a plus if you’re going for a design job).  There are a variety of different themes available, most of which come with bright, high-contrast colours as standard, however there is the option to completely change the colour scheme in favour of something a little less in-your-face.  It’ll be really interesting to see if they expand the existing options and allow users to create their own themes and customise the shapes and objects they use to create truly individual templates.  You can edit your information slightly as well, customising your skills and employment history by adding extra information outside of LinkedIn.  The options are slightly limited though, such as only being able to have languages, interests or recommendations but not a combination of the three.

All in all, it’s fun to have a play around and see what you can do with your employment information.  If nothing else, it prompted me to go back and tidy up my profile on LinkedIn.  Hopefully, once it moves out of beta into mainstream operation, we’ll see them open the site up to customisation and home brew themes.  Once (and if) that happens, I think the whole thing will become a lot more interesting.  If they go down the route of wordpress style themes you’ll see a plethora of styles appear from all over and hopefully extra options to allow individual users to tailor elements of the visualisation to suit their own tastes.

It’s a solid start though and I’m looking forward to seeing how they build on the public beta and develop the site over time.  It may not replace my CV long term but if they can improve the customisation options I certainly wouldn’t be adverse to sticking a link to my online CV visualisation on my paper version.  Check out my visualisation here or create your own.