Week 01 · 22 February 2027 · Tutorial

Self-Audit Clinic

The floor-setting tutorial: bring three real job ads and whatever materials you have, and audit every claim against evidence you could produce today.

self-audit clinicThis week's lecture →

Term of the week

truthfloor — The lowest claim you could make about yourself and still defend it in a room containing someone able to check. Most CVs are written a full storey above their author's truthfloor, which is survivable right up until the follow-up question.

You will spend ninety minutes this week arguing with your own CV, and you will lose. That is the intended outcome.

Bring

Three real job advertisements for roles you would actually take, and whatever materials you currently have — however embarrassing, and embarrassing is the median. A half-finished portfolio is a better starting position than a polished one, because there is less to unlearn.

Do not tidy anything before you arrive. Tidying before an audit is the exact habit this course exists to interrupt.

In the room

Your convenor puts one column on the board labelled claim and one labelled what I could show, today, in ninety seconds. You fill both. The gap between them is your receipt debt, and week 4 is about paying it down; this week you only have to look at it.

Then, in pairs, you read your claims aloud to someone who does not know you. They ask “show me” exactly once per claim. Anything you cannot answer gets a mark beside it. Nobody is being caught out — the marks are the deliverable.

Your stream runs its own version of the second half:

  • Technical Practice audits a CV against one repository. A claim survives if it points at something that runs.
  • Creative and Communications Practice audits a portfolio piece by piece, separating finished from in progress honestly, including the pieces that have been in progress for two years.
  • Commercial and Public Practice audits a LinkedIn profile and one cover letter, on the single test of whether a claim survives one “show me”.

Leaving with

Dossier §1, your Baseline Inventory: every claim, its evidence status, and nothing aspirational. Dossier §2, three target advertisements, chosen and not yet analysed — week 2 takes them apart.

Nothing this week is graded. The point of an ungraded first week is that you have no incentive to perform for it, which is the only week of the semester where that is true, and it is why the inventory you write now is the one you will trust in week 12.

A note on what this course is asking of you

The course is built on a distinction it will hold to for twelve weeks: framing what is true is professional practice; claiming what is not is fraud. Every technique taught here lives on one side of that line. If a session ever seems to be teaching you the other thing, you have misread it, or we have taught it badly — say so, and we will fix the session.

This week, by stream

Your stream's version

Stream 01 of 03

Technical Practice

Audit a CV plus one repo; every claim must point at something that runs.

Stream 02 of 03

Creative and Communications Practice

Audit a portfolio; mark which pieces are finished and which are in progress.

Stream 03 of 03

Commercial and Public Practice

Audit a LinkedIn and a cover letter; mark which claims survive a single show me.

Who's running this one

Teaching team