4 October 2026 by Mondo2.0

Is the curriculum vitae dead?

Is the curriculum vitae still the right tool? How much does online reputation matter?

For over a century, the curriculum vitae has had a very simple task: to tell who we are in the world of work. Education, experience, skills, positions. Everything arranged in order, preferably chronological. The curriculum, in fact, stems from a particular idea of a career: a linear, orderly path and, above all, one that can be told through a sequence of stages. First education, then the first job, followed by subsequent experiences and growing responsibilities. But today’s professional trajectories look less and less like this linear model.

Careers have become more discontinuous, roles overlap, skills are acquired outside formal paths as well and, above all, throughout the entire span of working life. A professional can simultaneously work for a company, take part in a project, publish articles, speak at a conference, contribute to a community and build relationships with hundreds of people in their field.

A substantial part of this activity does not fit easily into a curriculum, which, by its very nature, has an indispensable need for synthesis.

A multidimensional path can instead be followed through the digital traces it leaves over time.

Online presence is potentially continuous, almost the opposite of a CV condensed into one or two pages.

The Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, long before the existence of social networks, described social life through a theatrical metaphor. In everyday interactions, individuals try to manage the impression they produce on others, like actors on a stage.

Applied to the digital world of work, the metaphor works surprisingly well.

LinkedIn has become the stage. The curriculum, increasingly often, is the dressing room.

In a CV, we carefully select what we want to show. On a platform such as LinkedIn, instead, we build a narrative over time: we share results, comment on events, take part in discussions, make relationships and affiliations visible.

We no longer present only what we have done. We present who we want to appear to be.

Naturally, this representation does not concern LinkedIn alone.

Other public spaces on the web also contribute to the construction of reputation: an article published years earlier, a public contribution, a project featured on an organization’s website and, in some cases, content shared on social networks as well.

Here a first paradox emerges.

A person who is very active online can build an extremely rich presence: they publish frequently, recount their results, take part in discussions, maintain a very broad network. But this dynamism does not necessarily correspond to their actual professional ability.

Another person, equally competent or even more competent, may simply have no interest, time or communication skills to do the same.

This can therefore produce a possible short circuit of visibility, capable of generating a new form of inequality: not only between those who have more or fewer skills, but between those who are visible and those who remain invisible.

In the attention market, work too risks being assessed through the ability to show it or, better still, to show oneself.

Tools created to make abilities and experience recognizable can therefore end up rewarding above all those who know how to build their public image better.

The phenomenon inevitably also changes the recruiter’s job. If selection previously consisted mainly of analysing information declared within a relatively standardized document, today it can include the interpretation of a genuine digital narrative identity.

It is no longer only a matter of checking where someone has worked. The aim is to understand what topics they address, what relationships they have, how they communicate, what results they present, what image of themselves they have built over time and how closely that image corresponds to reality.

Selection thus takes on, at least in part, an almost hermeneutic dimension: interpreting an individual through the traces they have left.

And every interpretation carries biases with it.

Age, gender, social background, familiarity with digital tools, writing ability, sector of activity: all these are elements that can influence the quantity and quality of online presence.

And artificial intelligence could make this scenario even more uncertain.

There is then one final fundamental difference between the curriculum and digital identity: memory.

A curriculum can be updated. Some experiences can be removed, others summarized, still others reinterpreted. The web, by contrast, has a much longer memory. An unfortunate comment, a controversy, a position later abandoned can continue to re-emerge through a search.

The curriculum tells the past we choose to present. The web returns a much more complex picture.

This profoundly changes the relationship between professional identity and time.

So, is the curriculum vitae really dead?

Probably not. In fact, certainly not.

It will continue to be used because it retains a characteristic that is still valuable: it forces us to synthesize.

Direct knowledge, personal exchange and the interview remain fundamental: moments that are still central today for understanding a person, assessing their skills, attitudes and potential without reducing them to the representation they offer of themselves.

The CV, therefore, is no longer the principal tool of selection, but one of the elements of a broader, dynamic and continuously evolving whole.

What is certain is that, in this World 2.0, our professional identity is no longer enclosed in a document: it is built and changes over time, becoming a sort of permanent narrative.

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