A Journey to the Heart of One's Resources
"I didn't just want to redo my CV. I wanted to understand what I had actually built."
Antoine – a fictional character – is 45 years old. He has just finished a multi-year mission with an NGO. Before that, he worked in logistics, looked after his children part-time, set up a small community project around composting… Today, he needs to take stock. Not to land a job at any cost, but to find meaning again.
It is his adviser who tells him about Uscope, and more specifically about the ePortfolio approach. Not just another platform, but a structuring tool for seeing his life differently.
Step 1: Drawing his trajectory (outside Uscope)
Antoine starts simply: a large sheet, a pencil, and post-its. He draws a lifeline. Childhood, studies, first jobs, breaks, encounters, unexpected turns. Everything goes in.
Gradually, themes emerge: transmission, tinkering, teamwork, resourcefulness, the need for freedom…
Step 2: His first experience in Uscope: "My life trajectory"
He goes to Uscope and creates a first experience. He simply titles it: "My life trajectory". It is his entry point, a kind of meta-narrative.
He describes what he did on paper, but above all, what it made him feel. The thread begins to appear. He adds a photo of his chart.
Step 3: Categorising his life
In Uscope, he creates his own categories: "Family life", "Civic engagement", "Salaried positions", "Personal projects", "Tipping points".
This homemade taxonomy will serve as his reading grid for what follows.
Step 4: The on-the-fly inventory
Antoine then moves on to the inventory. He does not write yet, he sows.
In Uscope, he creates about thirty experience sheets with just:
- A title ("Moving abroad", "Volunteer coach", "Loss of meaning in 2017"…),
- A period,
- One or several categories.
A raw cartography of his life experience.
Step 5: The "magnifying glasses" — zoom on 5 experiences
This is where it becomes really interesting.
He selects 5 experiences he feels are significant by adding the "Magnifying glass" category to them.
He truly documents them: context, actions, emotions, learnings… And above all, he brings out his resources: what he mobilised, what he learned.
Example: in his experience of coaching young people, he discovers that he developed a posture of listening, support, facilitation… Far more than he imagined.
Step 6: Materialising his resources
Antoine prints all his resources in the form of small cards, directly from Uscope.
He cuts them out, spreads them on the table, sorts them, groups them, questions them. And there, something obvious appears: certain resources repeat, cross over. He gives them names: "Cooperate", "Adapt", "Care", "Structure"…
He has begun to name his competencies, in his own way.
Step 7: Challenging himself with a framework
Curious, Antoine activates a transversal competency framework in Uscope, that of a member of an agile organisation.
Not to grade himself, but to make connections. And it works: several competencies he thought were "off the grid" find an echo.
He annotates them, links them to his experiences. Another reading of himself takes shape.
Final step: His project
To close this cycle, Antoine creates a last experience: "My project".
It is not a job description. It is an intention: supporting transitions, collectively, with a strong ecological dimension. He does not yet know in what form, but he knows why.
Uscope's structuring approach that helped him take stock of his past is equally effective for talking about the future. He uses an experience type called "Objective" that will lead him to look at a prospective analysis of his project, while accompanying him with relevant questions in this vision.
And now?
Antoine does not close Uscope. On the contrary, he has made it a travelling companion. His ePortfolio is not a fixed file, but a living, evolving space that he can enrich at any time: a new mission, a significant encounter, a training that shakes him up.
He has also understood that he can choose what he shares. Some experiences remain personal, intimate. Others can be shown to a coach, a recruiter, a project partner. This power to modulate his expression is also a way to regain confidence.
But beyond the tool, it is the posture he has adopted that changes everything. He no longer seeks to "sell himself", but to understand himself, to reconnect, to build a project aligned with his values and resources.
His project is not yet mapped out, and that is perfectly fine. Because from now on, he knows how to read the weak signals in his past experiences, and bring out concrete courses of action. The assessment approach, as proposed by ARRA, and Uscope have allowed him to reconnect the dots of his life — not to go back, but to move forward with more clarity, coherence, and above all, serenity.
Article co-written by Patrick Favre and ChatGPT – in the service of a shared vision: making the portfolio a tool for exploration, recognition and self-transformation.