Your career record

Documents → Your career

This is the master copy: every role you have held, every qualification, every skill, written down once. CV variants select from it. They never copy it, so correcting a job title here corrects it on every CV you have.

What it holds

Section	Notes
Experience	Roles you have held. Leave the end date empty for your current one.
Education	Qualifications, finished or in progress.
Projects	Things you built that are worth showing.
Skills	Grouped under headings you invent, such as Languages or Infrastructure.
Certifications	With issuer, dates and a credential link.
Languages	Spoken languages, rated on the CEFR scale (A1 to C2, or native).

Every section is listed down the left, with how many entries it holds, so the page can be navigated rather than scrolled through. A section with nothing in it is listed all the same — that is how you find out the page can hold your languages. On a phone the list is a strip above the sections that scrolls sideways.

The organisations you have worked for are kept separately from the companies you are applying to. They are unrelated lists, and joining them would put former employers into the company picker for new applications.

Highlights, one per line

Experience, education and projects each have a highlights field. Write one achievement per line — no bullet characters, no markup:

Cut deploy time from 40 minutes to 4.
Mentored three engineers through their first year.
Ran the migration off the legacy billing system.

They render as a bulleted list. Keeping them as plain lines means reordering is editing text, and a CV variant can replace the whole set with a textarea rather than a fiddly set of checkboxes.

The same entry in another language

An entry can say the same thing in more than one language, so a French CV is a translation rather than a second career. Open an entry, then Other languages, pick a language, and fill in as much or as little as you like.

Every box is optional, and that is the point. A job title is often the only thing worth translating; leave the summary empty and the original prints. Correcting a date, an employer or anything else on the entry corrects it in every language at once — that is the whole reason this is a translation and not a copy.

Some things are not translated, on purpose. The organisation you worked for and the institution that taught you keep their own names: Universidade de Lisboa stays that on an English CV, and rendering it as "University of Lisbon" invents an employer who never existed. Certifications have no translations at all, because a credential's name and the body that issued it are that body's wording — an English rendering of it is not the same credential.

What can be said differently is either your own words — a summary, your highlights, a project you named — or something that genuinely differs between languages: a job title, a city (Lisbon, Lisboa), a qualification, a grade on a scale that does not exist elsewhere.

Tell Postulo which language your record is written in, under Your details on the profile page: it is what stops a CV in that same language reporting every entry as untranslated. Leave it blank and it follows the language you read Postulo in.

A CV variant's own tailored highlights still win over a translation. Somebody who wrote highlights for one CV wrote them for the CV in front of them.

Links: portfolios, profiles, videos

Documents → Your career record → Links

Some of your work already lives somewhere: a portfolio, a personal site, the code you have published, a paper, or a video of you talking for two minutes. That is an address, not a file, so Postulo keeps it as one. A link has a title, the address, a kind — portfolio, personal site, code, design, publication, video, other — and one line of description for whoever is reading.

Links go on a CV like any other entry, as a Links section, and can be sent with an application alongside your CV and letters; the timeline records which ones you pointed them at.

Video CVs belong here too, as a link of the video kind: an unlisted upload on YouTube, Vimeo, a PeerTube instance or your own share. That is what almost everyone actually does, and it costs you nothing here. Postulo does not host video itself.

Check it answers. A portfolio address that returns "not found" on the day a recruiter clicks it is the worst outcome this record exists to prevent, and Postulo cannot see it from the inside because it never visits your links. So there is a button: Check it answers on one link, Check them all on the section. One request each, when you press it, and the result is kept beside the link. Nothing is ever checked on a schedule.

The check only ever visits public addresses. A link pointing at something on your own network — 192.168.…, localhost, a name that resolves to either — is reported as broken without a request being made, and so is a public address that redirects to one. That is true even on an instance where POSTULO_CONNECTIONS_ALLOW_PRIVATE is on for plugins: a portfolio address is something a recruiter clicks from the open internet, so an answer from inside your house would not tell you anything you wanted to know.

Identifiers

A name is not an identity. Two researchers share one, one researcher publishes under three, and a marriage or a transliteration turns one into another. An ORCID says which researcher you are regardless, and in academia it is what an application form asks for by name — so Your details takes one, along with a ResearcherID, a Scopus Author ID, an ISNI, your Wikidata item, your LinkedIn profile, or anything else under Other with a name you give it.

A scheme knows what it identifies. Some identify people, some identify organisations, and three — ISNI, Wikidata and LinkedIn — identify both, which is why they now appear on your details as well as on a company. What identifies only a company is not offered here and is refused if something tries: an LEI is not a person, and a company register number is not one either.

Paste the whole address if that is what you have; Postulo keeps the identifier. An ORCID's last character is a checksum, so a mistyped one is refused with the reason. Nothing is ever looked up: Postulo asks orcid.org nothing, and the checksum catches what a lookup would.

Identifiers appear in a CV's contact block beside your website, on the variants where you have asked for contact details.

Importing a Europass CV

Documents → Your career → Import

If you have applied to an EU institution, or through a national employment service, you already have a Europass CV. Typing that career record in a second time is exactly the work Postulo exists to remove, so it will read the file instead.

Postulo reads both Europass formats:

• the JSON, which is what europass.europa.eu exports today;
• the XML, which is what the old CV editor produced and what an older export sitting on your disk still is. It does not matter which namespace the file carries — Europass has been through several over the years, and all of them read.

Reading a file is a plugin, and Europass is the one that ships in the box — so the page offers whatever this instance can read rather than Europass by name. Nothing else reads career files yet; the point is that the next format need not wait for a new release of Postulo.

You do not have to know which one you have. There is one file box; Postulo works out which format it was handed and tells you on the review page.

It happens in two steps

1. Choose the file. Postulo reads it and shows you what it found: how many positions, qualifications, languages, skills and projects, and which personal details are in it.
2. Press the button. Nothing reaches your career record until you have seen the list and confirmed it.

Between the two steps Postulo holds the parsed record, not your file. There is no reason to keep somebody's CV on a server for longer than it takes to read it.

What it will and will not do

An import only ever adds. Nothing already in your career record is changed or removed. If you import the same file twice you will have everything twice, and deleting the copies is a minute's work — losing something you had written is not.

Blank fields on Your details are filled in: headline, telephone, where you live, your website, and your name if you have not given one. A field that already says something is left exactly as it is. Your own words about yourself beat a form you filled in years ago.

A skill heading you already have — Digital, say — is used rather than repeated, so you do not end up with the same heading twice.

If one of the websites in the file is an ORCID address, it is lifted out and kept as an identifier rather than as another link — that is what an academic application form asks for by name. Its checksum decides: a mistyped one is dropped rather than saved, and orcid.org is asked nothing. An ORCID you already have is left as it is.

A file that is only half right

An export can be missing pieces, or carry a section in a shape Postulo does not recognise. That is not a reason to refuse the lot. The half that reads is imported, and the review page lists what could not be read before you confirm, so nothing goes missing quietly. After the import, anything that was read but not written — a job with no start date, which there is nothing to order — is named in a message rather than dropped.

A date is treated the same way. A month or a day that is simply absent becomes the first of the period, because people write "2019" and mean it. A month that is present and unreadable produces no date at all: turning nonsense into January could misdate a job by eleven months, and being told is better than being wrong.

Languages lose four levels of five

Europass records listening, reading, conversation, speaking and writing separately, and almost nobody is the same at all five. Postulo keeps one level per language, so it takes the lowest. Claiming the best of five on a CV is the kind of thing that gets found out in an interview. The review page shows you all five before you confirm, so you can correct it afterwards knowing exactly what was set aside.

A file that states no level at all leaves the language without one. The review page says so, the language is imported with its level Not stated, and a CV prints its name with nothing after it. A level is a claim about yourself that somebody will test in an interview, so it is yours to make rather than Postulo's to guess — set it on the entry when you know what you would claim.

The language the file was written in

Every Europass export names the language it is written in, and Postulo takes it: if the language of your career record on Your details is still blank, the import fills it in. That is the setting that decides which entries Postulo reports as not yet translated, so without it a career typed in Portuguese was reported as falling back on every line of a Portuguese CV. If you have already chosen one, it is left exactly as it is, like every other field an import touches.

What is refused

The file came from somewhere else, so it is read carefully. There is a 5 MB cap for both formats. Any XML carrying a document type declaration is refused outright without being parsed: that is where entity expansion lives — the "billion laughs" attack and external entity fetches both need one — and a genuine Europass export has no use for it. JSON that nests more than forty levels deep is refused too, because a career record is not that deep. Nothing is fetched while reading: no schema is resolved and no network request is made.

A file that is neither format, that does not parse, or that has no LearnerInfo section is refused with the reason rather than half-imported.

From the command line

An operator with a shell can do the same thing:

python manage.py import_europass cv.json --user alex@example.org --dry-run

Either format, and the file decides which: the command says which one it read.

--dry-run says what it found and writes nothing. Without it, the import runs and reports what it added.

Ordering

The order of each section is yours. The arrows on the overview move an entry past its neighbour: up swaps it with the one above, down with the one below, and at either end the arrow is greyed out. That is the whole control, and it works with the keyboard and with scripts off.

A new experience, education or certification lands where its date would put it — newest first, an ongoing one at the top — so adding your latest job still puts it first; after that the arrows own it, and a date you edit later moves nothing. A new project, skill, language or link goes at the end of its section.

If you cannot use the arrows, or would rather type a number, switch on Show the order number on each career entry under Settings → Appearance. Each entry's form then shows its place as a number, lower first, and the number you type is kept exactly. This is an accessibility choice, which is why it lives beside the theme and the navigation rather than on the career page.

Previewing

Preview shows everything you have written, in one page, as continuous prose. It is not a CV — it has no selection and no theme. It is there so you can read what you have and spot the gaps.