This report highlights some of the key trends affecting job seekers and aims to provide a jumping-off point for professional bodies and membership organisations to better serve their members through enhanced career development resources.

1. Key Career
Development
Trends in 2024
Written by Matt Craven, CEO and Founder of The CV & Interview Advisors

2. Table of Contents..........................................................................................................................................................02
Key Career Development Trends in 2024......................................................................................................................03
The heightened importance of personal branding........................................................................................................04
Standing out in a highly competitive job market...........................................................................................................05
The case for thought leadership for senior professionals..............................................................................................07
AI tools to boost job-seeking and career progression....................................................................................................08
Standing out and getting promoted in the age of remote working................................................................................10
Interviews in a virtual world............................................................................................................................................13
Social media's impact on job seekers..............................................................................................................................14
The emergence of video CVs...........................................................................................................................................16
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................................................17
Follow Up.........................................................................................................................................................................18
Table of Contents

3. …11,500 applicants for 20 technical jobs
within one week of them being live.
KEY CAREER
DEVELOPMENT
TRENDS IN 2024
Career development is high on the agenda of many
professionals with nearly three-quarters of employees
considering a job change in 2024. This renders the job market
highly competitive, which is reinforced by a recent LinkedIn
post from a recruiter who had received...
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To stand out amongst a sea of candidates, job seekers need
to apply much more rigour to their job-seeking tactics than
ever before.
This report highlights some of the
key trends affecting job seekers
and aims to provide a jumping-off
point for professional bodies and
membership organisations to
better serve their members
through enhanced career
development resources.
And it’s not just job seekers – in a global economy affected by
geopolitical tension, the slowdown of the Chinese economy,
economic contraction in many other regions, inflationary
pressures, and the advent of artificial intelligence – climbing
the career ladder has become more competitive and complex.

4. As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said,
'Your personal brand is what people say
about you when you are not in the room.'
THE HEIGHTENED
IMPORTANCE OF
PERSONAL BRANDING
Once a bit of a buzz word that evoked the usual
dismissive wave of the hand, personal branding
is now firmly in the mainstream. From Jeff Bezos
to Richard Branson, personal brand is talked
about far and wide and plays an important role
in career progression and job seeking.
Employees are required to know what they
stand for and how they want to be seen by
others. A strong personal brand will support
career progression, whereas less focus on one’s
personal PR can be detrimental to any potential
promotion opportunities.
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LinkedIn provides a measure of its users' personal brand through their SSI score and claims that
professionals with a high SSI are promoted 17 months faster than their peers. Professionals
with a high SSI are 51% more likely to hit target and 78% outperform their peers.
Job seekers also need to pay attention to their personal
brand and have a strong handle on their go-to-market pitch,
career narrative, value proposition, strengths, skills, and track
record. Fundamentally knowing the value they can offer an
employer, and how that employer will achieve ROI from their
investment, are crucial to landing a job.
Knowing how to convey these messages in a CV and LinkedIn
profile are all current challenges for the 75% of professionals
that research claims are looking to move jobs in 2024.
Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors could run a webinar for your members
on Personal Branding. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.

5. STANDING OUT IN A
HIGHLY 
COMPETITIVE
JOB MARKET
With the sheer volume of applicants for each
role, it’s a challenge to stand out and get
noticed, but if we cast our mind back to
immediately after the pandemic, we had high
volumes of vacancies but fewer people looking
to move jobs. This created a scenario where
employers were suffering a severe shortage of
viable applicants, and many became far less
sensitive to the quality of CVs and LinkedIn
profiles – beggars couldn’t be choosers at the
time. Fast forward to 2024 and we have the
opposite scenario – candidates need to have
highly professional job-seeking collateral and a
positive profile to stand out.
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Both employers and recruiters are sensitive to the aesthetic quality and content of both CVs and
LinkedIn profiles. We are no longer in a market where a generic CV that’s no more than two
pages of job descriptions is enough. A CV needs to be highly targeted and aligned with current
market expectations with job seekers being encouraged to embrace marketing tactics such as go-
to-market descriptions, value proposition statements, CV SEO (ATS optimisation), case studies,
linguistic mirroring, social proofing and more. Homing in on CV SEO, it is claimed that...
...70% of CVs are rejected by applicant tracking systems (ATS) due to
improper formatting and lack of targeted content.

6. LinkedIn demands an equally robust approach.
Profiles without photos receive 21 times less
views, professionals without a background
banner are considered lesser than those who
have added a professional image, and a
selection of solid recommendations increase
the chances of an offer/enquiry three-fold. And
that’s before we start discussing how to trigger
the LinkedIn algorithm to propel a profile higher
up in the searches; peer-to-peer connections,
user activity, skills placement, and keyword
density all have a bearing on how likely job
seekers are to be found.
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And that’s before we start discussing how to trigger the LinkedIn algorithm to propel a profile
higher up in the searches; peer-to-peer connections, user activity, skills placement, and keyword
density all have a bearing on how likely job seekers are to be found.
Appearing in searches is one thing, but what
happens when an employer or recruiter
starts reading the profile? Most recruiters
use the LinkedIn recruiter license, and the
way candidates are displayed renders the
Headline and About section super
important. The content of a LinkedIn profile
has to be compelling and evidence-based to
stand out.
Another interesting development is senior job seekers being encouraged by recruiters to
participate in thought leadership activities to raise their profile and boost their attractiveness to
employers. We know thought leaders are prized by employers, but recruiters encouraging job
seekers to embrace thought leadership is a significant shift in thinking.
"Your personal brand is what sets you apart. It's what makes you unique and
memorable. Don't be afraid to let your true self shine through." - Richard Branson
Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors could offer your members a free 1-2-1
CV/LinkedIn profile review. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.

7. THE CASE FOR THOUG
HT
LEADERSHIP FOR SENIOR
PROFESSIONALS
Thought leadership is where an individual or
business positions themselves as a leader in
their particular field or industry, often through
the generation and dissemination of innovative,
insightful, and forward-thinking ideas. Put
another way, it’s personal branding taken to the
next level.
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To become a thought leader, one would develop their own intellectual property, which might be
a philosophy, concept, framework, blueprint, system, process, or way of working. This personal
intellectual property (or what we call P-I-P) is then formalised and named.
This P-I-P can then be talked and written about in articles, blogs, books, and presentations. The
more this P-I-P is shared, the more the individual’s profile is raised.
Many organisations are also using thought leadership as a tool for corporate growth, so naturally,
these organisations are drawn to leaders and employees who embrace these concepts. By
embracing thought leadership, senior job seekers can promote a more sophisticated personal
brand that catapults them to the top of shortlists.
According to LinkedIn, executives who are active thought leaders on the platform receive 5x
more connection requests and 6x more profile views, and a LinkedIn survey discovered that
45% of decision-makers said they would be more willing to award a promotion to an employee
who is a thought leader in their industry.
"The thought leader is the one brave enough to think differently, boldly and louder
than everyone else." - Robin Sharma (Author and Leadership Expert)
If you think your members would be interested in a workshop on thought leadership, get in
touch and we can send you a sample of a previous session that we have delivered.

8. AI TOOLS TO BOOST J
OB-
SEEKING AND CAREER
PROGRESSION
Artificial intelligence has taken the world by
storm with many citing it as the biggest
technology leap since the introduction of the
internet. It would be a worthy topic to discuss
how AI is replacing humans and how the
technology is likely to continue to replace a
large percentage of jobs over the next ten years,
but we’ll focus our attention on how career-
minded professionals and job seekers can
harness AI to get ahead.
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ChatGPT has received plenty of media
coverage and provides a good place to start.
It describes itself as being a sophisticated
language model belonging to the Generative
Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) family that
excels in generating human-like text and
engaging in conversational interactions.
Trained on a vast corpus of text, ChatGPT can
understand and respond to a wide range of
topics, making it versatile for applications
such as virtual assistance, content creation,
and customer service.
A study by Burning Glass Technologies, who specialise in job market analytics, found that job
seekers who receive personalised car
eer advice through AI tools are 2.5 times more likely to
find employment in a new field.
Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors could run a webinar for your members on
using AI to grow their careers. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.

9. These capabilities can be used to aid both career development and job seeking, which we will
explore next.
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It is a very useful tool for career planning,
helping professionals to research job
requirements and perform a skills gap analysis.
These capabilities can help in creating a Career
Autobiography which is a tool developed by The
CV & Interview Advisors that supports
professionals to plan their career, write their CV,
prepare for interviews, position themselves for
promotion or a pay rise, and participate in
performance appraisals.
ChatGPT has writing abilities and can help job seekers to write CVs, LinkedIn profiles and cover
letters. It needs to be used responsibly though, and recruiters/employers are already becoming
wary, if not somewhat negative towards AI-generated CVs. The trained eye can often spot them a
mile off and it has been suggested that ATS’ will start introducing AI detection functionality in the
not-too-distant future.
It wouldn’t be an overestimation to predict that prompting AI will become an essential life skill in
the near future. ChatGPT is also a useful ally for job seekers preparing for interviews. It can be
used to research organisations and industries, to suggest interview questions based on a job
description, to provide sample/example answers, and to assess the strength and coherence of
their answers. Obviously there are limitations to the feedback a ‘bot’ can give, but its ability to
assess the strength of an interview answer should not be underestimated, and job seekers would
be missing a trick to not use this capability if they don’t have access to human feedback.
Interims and contractors can use AI to ideate, build, and execute marketing activities, and going
back to thought leadership, ChatGPT’s content creation capabilities can help write whitepapers,
presentations, articles, blogs, and social media posts.
"AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours." - Demis Hassabis (Co-
founder and CEO of DeepMind)
Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors could run a webinar for your members on
using AI to grow their careers. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.

10. STANDING OUT AND
GETTING PROMO
TED
IN THE AGE OF
REMOTE WORKING
In the remote working era, visibility has become
a prized commodity. Gone are the days when
physical presence in an office could
manufacture encounters with senior
management or display your dedication through
long hours at your desk. In 2024, the paradigm
has shifted dramatically. Professionals working
from home must now navigate a digital
landscape where getting noticed requires a
different approach.
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Let us start by quoting some statistics published on Forbes Advisor in mid-2023 citing that 53%
of remote workers say it’s harder to feel connected to their coworkers and 69% of remote
workers report increased burnout from digital communication tools.
In a remote environment, employees are
out of sight, which can often mean out of
mind. To combat this, proactive
communication is key. Regular updates
with managers and teams about activities,
projects, and achievements will help to
shine a light on contributions.

11. Creating a Career Autobiography, which
constitutes a record/log of one’s experiences,
projects, and achievements is a great way to
keep track of key contributions. These
experiences are written as short case studies,
ideally using the STAR framework, and are
categorised by skills and competencies. These
skills and competencies should focus on the
requirements of both existing and future desired
positions and career paths. A complete Career
Autobiography might contain between 30 and
100 case studies, which can then be used as
collateral when sitting down with managers,
attending a performance review, justifying a
promotion or pay rise, writing a CV, or preparing
for interviews.
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Ultimately, having sight of these experiences and contributions makes it easier to shine a
spotlight on oneself.
Putting digital burnout aside, the digital
workspace has given rise to alternative forms
of collaboration and networking that should
be taken advantage of in place of the
physical interactions that are now less
prevalent. Virtual coffee chats, participation
in online company forums, and leading
digital initiatives or workgroups can help
build internal networks. These platforms
provide an opportunity to showcase
leadership, stakeholder management, and
other business skills beyond immediate team
members. Ultimately, the more employees
engage in conversations or meetings, the
more opportunities they have to build a
personal brand.

12. Adapting to the unique challenges of remote
work involves effective management of online
presence. Just as a polished LinkedIn profile is
crucial in the job market, maintaining a
professional digital persona within an
organisation is equally important. This
includes being mindful of contributions in
virtual meetings, the clarity and tone of
written communications, and even video
conference etiquette.
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The power of mentorship and sponsorship
in a remote setting should not be
underestimated. Cultivating relationships
with mentors or sponsors within an
organisation can provide invaluable
guidance and advocacy for career
advancement. It's about creating allies who
can champion causes in rooms where
decisions are made.
In summary, standing out and getting promoted while working remotely in 2024 is an art that
balances visibility, personal branding, and strategic networking. It's about making value known
and felt, even when not physically present in the office.
"Your work is going to fill a large part of
your life, and the only way to be truly
satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is
to love what you do. If you haven't found it
yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all
matters of the heart, you'll know when you
find it." - Steve Jobs (Co-founder of Apple)

13. INTERVIEWS IN A
VIRTUAL WO
RLD
In today’s virtual world, face-to-face interviews
have been replaced by a more virtual dynamic
with many interviews being held through
Zoom or Teams. Many organisations are now
using virtual interviewing platforms where
applicants are recorded answering questions
that simply appear on screen without the need
for a human interviewer.
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The transition to these online interviews has been driven by their cost-effectiveness and
efficiency. In particular, the aforementioned virtual interviewing platforms eradicate the need for
managers to attend first-round interviews, and if a candidate turns out to be unsuitable early in
the meeting, managers can simply use the platform’s functionality to send a rejection letter
without the need to sit through several more questions out of politeness.
A quick internet search suggests that over 90% of employers use virtual interviews at some stage.
Interestingly, virtual interviews seem to
bamboozle many job seekers – the internet
is awash with horror stories where people
have simply misjudged the requirements of
the virtual dynamic and not put their best
foot forward. Job seekers need to pay
attention to their technical setup, but also
their appearance i.e., attire and background,
as well as the way they communicate in an
environment where non-verbal
communication is less obvious.
Technological issues are a significant
challenge, and it is claimed that 7 out of 10
candidates miss out on job opportunities
due to technical problems.

14. SOCIAL MEDIA'S IMPACT
ON JOB SEEKERS
In the digital age, social media's influence on
job seeking has become increasingly crucial. As
organisations routinely check the social media
accounts of potential hires, the importance of
cultivating a robust personal brand on these
platforms cannot be overstated. A widely used
statistic from a study published by
CareerBuilder claims that 70% of employers
snoop on candidates’ social media profiles.
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In particular, LinkedIn plays an important
role for job seekers. It's not just a platform
for listing qualifications and work history;
it's a dynamic environment for
demonstrating industry involvement,
sharing insights, and building a network of
professional contacts. The content shared,
the groups joined, and the interactions on
this platform contribute significantly to how
job seekers are perceived.
In this context, personal branding on social media is about much more than just self-promotion.
It involves creating a narrative that aligns with career aspirations, showcasing expertise, and
engaging with relevant topics and trends in the industry. This approach requires a strategic and
thoughtful curation of content across various platforms, ensuring consistency in the message and
image presented.

15. The rise of visual platforms like Instagram and
TikTok has expanded the scope of personal
branding. These platforms allow for more
creative and personal expressions of
professional identity, reaching audiences in
innovative ways.
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Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors could offer your members a free 1-2-1
LinkedIn profile review. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.
In essence, social media in 2024 is a critical
tool for job seekers. It offers a space to not
only present a polished professional image but
also to engage meaningfully with the broader
professional community. This digital presence
can significantly influence career
opportunities, making it an essential aspect of
modern career development.
"Social media is not just an activity; it is an investment of valuable time and resources. Surround
yourself with people who not just support you and stay with you, but inform your thinking
about ways to 'do it better and different'." - Reid Hoffman (Co-Founder of LinkedIn)

16. THE EMERGENCE OF
VIDEO CVs
We have discussed the emergence of social media as an important pillar for job seeking and
mentioned how Instagram and TikTok provide new channels for professionals to express their
personal brand – this brings us to our final career development trend, which is video CVs.
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Video CVs allow for a dynamic and engaging
presentation of skills, experiences, and
personality. This format is particularly
effective in industries where creativity and
communication skills are prized. It enables
candidates to demonstrate their proficiency
in digital communication, a skill increasingly
valued in the modern workplace.
As the job market evolves, video CVs stand
out as a creative tool for personal branding,
enabling job seekers to make a more lasting
impression in a competitive landscape.
Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors have a workshop on how job seekers can
create an effective video CV. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.
Perhaps something that many industry
observers predicted to be bigger, sooner, video
CVs are starting to gain traction and provide job
seekers with a way to convey their talents in a
way that a traditional CV cannot. It’s unlikely
that traditional CVs will become obsolete
anytime soon but supplementing the age-old
two-three pager with something innovative and
more video-based can reap rewards, especially
when making applications to more forward-
thinking or tech-savvy employers.
"Video is a way to capture the moment,
and storytelling is a way to make sense of
it." - Sam Mendes (Leading Film
Director/Producer)

17. “We spend a third of our lives at work, and our jobs and careers play a key role in our
mental wellbeing and financial security; what could be a more important investment?”
- Matt Craven (CEO of The CV & Interview Advisors)
CONCLUSION
The complexity of career progression is not lost
on ambitious professionals. A recent survey by
one of the world’s largest professional bodies
found that assistance with career progression
and job seeking was a top priority for its
members and something that needs more focus.
The sentiment is that members are looking to
their professional bodies for robust career-
related resources. Our research shows that
around 23% of mid to senior-level candidates
have invested in career services such as CV
writing and interview coaching!
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Did you know? The CV & Interview Advisors have a workshop on how job seekers can
create an effective video CV. Get in touch via email or click here to find out more.
Job seekers are trying to gain an advantage to
make progress in a challenging job market, and
many are prepared to invest in themselves and
their career prospects. In further research
that we conducted, we also found that 83% of
professionals consider their career to be
more important than holidays, DIY, the latest
gadgets, or a new car.

18. If you are reading this blog as a representative of a professional body, please feel free to contact
me at mattcraven@cvandinterviewadvisors.co.uk for more information about the career
development programme that we offer to institutes, associations, societies, and other
membership-based organisations.
We have over 25 workshops on a range of career development and personal branding topics that
we could present to your members. We also provide articles and blogs and offer free CV and
LinkedIn profile reviews. Finally, we are able to offer your members discounted career services
such as career coaching, CV writing, LinkedIn profile authoring, interview coaching, and advice on
tackling the modern-day digital job market.
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