What is a professional identity layer?

A professional identity layer is a single structured record of someone’s working life — roles, projects, skills, achievements and the evidence behind each claim — that belongs to the person rather than to an employer or a platform. It is designed to be read by software as well as by people, so that any tool, recruiter or AI agent can work from the same verified source instead of a CV rewritten for the occasion.

How is it different from a CV or a LinkedIn profile?

A CV is a document written for one audience at one moment. It is edited for every application, it holds only what fits on two pages, and the version a company keeps is a snapshot of who you were on the day you sent it.

A profile on a platform is closer to a record, but the platform owns it. It decides what fields exist, who sees the profile, how it ranks and what happens to it if the terms change. Nothing in it is verified beyond the fact that somebody typed it.

An identity layer is neither. It is a structured record — machine-readable fields rather than prose — that holds the underlying facts once and generates the CV, the profile and the application from them. The document becomes an output rather than the original.

Why does the distinction matter now?

Because the reader has changed. For thirty years a career record was read by a person who could interpret an ambiguous line and ask a follow-up question. Increasingly it is read first by software: an applicant tracking system, a search index, or an AI agent asked to find or assess someone.

Software cannot interpret. It matches what it is given, and what it is given is unstructured, self-reported and scattered across a dozen services. The result is that good candidates are filtered on formatting and strong claims carry no more weight than weak ones.

What has to be true for it to work?

Three things. It has to be structured, so software can read it without guessing. It has to be verified, so a claim in it means more than a claim anywhere else. And it has to be owned by the individual, so it survives changing jobs, platforms and countries.

Drop any one and it collapses back into what already exists: structured but unverified is a database of assertions; verified but owned by a platform is a walled garden; owned but unstructured is a folder of documents.