Editor’s Note: this post originally appeared on the blog of Nikhil Thakkar. Nikhil is a senior and first year member of the Help Desk. Nikhil, as with the rest of the BHS Help Desk staff, effectively troubleshoots devices and can solve many technical problems. However, he also assists with meaningful integration of technology in the classroom. This year in particular, it’s been exciting to see Help Desk students move to the next level by offering their peers advice on how to prepare for the real world. Much of Nikhil’s personal blog has been devoted to helping his peers build positive digital footprints using LinkedIn (see his Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 series) and other social media tools. Nikhil began using social media tools to build his own personal learning network his sophomore year. Since then, he has connected with over 500 professionals and serves as an exceptional digital role model. In his latest post, Nikhil highlights the tool Re.Vu.

Re.Vu is an incredibly useful online, visual resume designed to help you organize and showcase your skills, experiences, education, and other accomplishments in an aesthetic yet simple form. Although several other online tools take time to create, building your Re.Vu is fast thanks to its seamless LinkedIn integration, as it continuously pulls your information from your LinkedIn profile into your Re.Vu and organizes it into a visually cohesive form. You simply login with your LinkedIn account, upload images you want on your profile, and select your desired theme. In this sense, creating a strong Re.Vu begins with creating (or already having) a strong LinkedIn. Yet adding your Re.Vu profile to your website (or LinkedIn) helps you increase your profile traffic and conversations to your website, as it encourages users to endorse your skills, rate your products, and share their ratings with other professionals on other social networks. As Assistant Superintendent of Burlington Public Schools Mr. Patrick Larkin stated recently, “…a student’s social media activity is rapidly becoming a modern-day version of a resume.” Indeed, having a Re.Vu isn’t the end goal; it’s the means to further support and strengthen your online digital presence, and ensure that a Google search of your name brings up what YOU want. Whereas other social networks often prove stagnant as time passes, Re.Vu allows you to review more products and connect with more professionals, eventually giving you the edge over other competitors in the professional realm even as time passes; your profile is consistently changing, and Re.Vu allows you to share these changes in real-time. As Re.Vu itself says, “there’s no better marketing tool than letting your customers speak for you.”

Although Re.Vu does indeed have a professional side, it’s also a great new way to make new friends and engage in otherwise impossible conversations with otherwise unknown people. Whether you’re the regular Facebook or Twitter user, a professional blogger, or the CEO of a local start-up, Re.Vu has unparalleled benefits in both the professional and social spheres; in fact what Re.Vu does beautifully is find the intersection of the two. Since resumes can, at times, be boring, many companies will often overlook the sheet of paper as another PDF burden to file. Yet with Re.Vu, you can constantly update your resume, change your theme to correspond with your latest endeavor, and wrap this all up in an aesthetically beautiful and professional page with experience, education, accomplishments and more. In fact, you can even download your Re.Vu profile as a PDF to serve as a traditional resume, similar to the downloadable feature LinkedIn offers. The specific sections Re.Vu offers include:

• Personal Data: personal information
• Timeline: for your experience
• Infographics: up to six tiles you can include with a number (no punctuation) and a few words, along with a few graphs and charts
• Portfolio: images that the reader can scroll through
• Education: degree or certification, school and year
• Work Examples: samples of things you have createdIn this sense, fleshing out the interactive resume is rather straightforward.

By following the step by step directions on each of the [above] pages, you can work through the prompts and create both a strong Re.Vu and an interactive LinkedIn; the best part: you can see the progress as you continue working to build your profile. Yet while Re.Vu has all these features, perhaps my favorite is the timeline style aesthetically beautiful visual resume platform. Your company name and title immediately and automatically link to a popup for details; but that isn’t before you’re allowed to introduce yourself through a cohesive biography where professionals can see what you’re all about. Another helpful feature is that which reduces many accomplishments to numbers and percentages; for example, you can state that you’ve started “5 Businesses,” created “3 websites,” influenced “16% of high school students,” and fundamentally introduce and summarize your accomplishments with numbers. I just created my Re.Vu yesterday (see some screenshots below), but if you’d like to learn more about me specifically, feel free to check out my LinkedIn!