Open Career Format
A private career notebook that becomes every resume you'll ever need.
OCF preserves what you did, what changed, what you learned, and what mattered — so it's there the next time you need it.
Site last updated: 2026-06-29
A private career notebook that becomes every resume you'll ever need.
OCF preserves what you did, what changed, what you learned, and what mattered — so it's there the next time you need it.
Site last updated: 2026-06-29
Applying for a job right now? If you are comfortable sharing the materials with the LLM or tool you are using, attach your resume and the job description. Do not include anything that tool should not process.
Best local-agent experience: if your tool supports skills, start with the OCF Start skill. It routes you to the right OCF workflow. The OCF Setup skill can organize your local master file, backups, source materials, and application outputs.
Skills and prompts use the same OCF guidance. The prompt works anywhere you can paste text. The skill adds local file management: where the master lives, where backups go, where sources are stored, and where each application's outputs belong. All still under your control, and fully open and readable.
Using only this OCF bootstrap:
https://opencareerformat.org/prompts/application-bootstrap.md
plus my attached resume and job description, help me create a better resume and cover letter for this role.
Do not search for general prompt-writing, resume, schema, or background advice unless I ask you to.
First give me the gap read: what the job asks for, what my resume proves, and what is missing or under-evidenced. Ask no more than three targeted questions. After I answer, draft the resume and cover letter. Before creating or updating the OCF file, ask me for one story about my work I would never put on a formal resume and preserve it in my own words. Then create a candidate-master OCF file or proposed OCF update set for next time, and remind me to save it next to my resume.Save the OCF file next to your resume. Next time, attach both.
Building tools instead? Start with usage patterns.
Maria's resume said: "Led response to a ransomware incident and restored critical clinical systems within 41 hours." A first session turned that bullet point into structured career memory: the judgment call behind it, the metrics, the wording for different audiences, the claims not to overstate. And one request for a work story surfaced how she rethought what authority meant after leaving the Army, preserved in her own words. Six months later, that story became a VP-interview answer her resume alone could never produce.
Read the full worked example: a plain resume becomes career memory, then a better interview answer
The next time you need to update your resume, you're probably under pressure — and you hit the same wall most people do. You know you did good work, but the details are gone: the number, the outcome, the story behind the bullet point. Most career details disappear before you need them, scattered across old documents, reviews, dashboards, notes, and systems you may not use forever.
OCF's answer isn't "keep better records." A tool helps with the resume you need right now and quietly keeps what it learns about you — so next time, the details are already there instead of lost.
OCF defines what gets preserved and how it stays portable. Tools decide how to ask questions, curate for a target, and export finished files. For many people, the first tool is an LLM in a chat window. For local agents such as Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor, OCF also publishes small skills that route the workflow and organize files without changing the underlying prompts. The project ships reference prompts, skills, and examples so people and tool builders have a practical starting point. For file roles, third-party workflows, and integration patterns, see usage patterns.
OCF is a file format, not a platform. There is no account, no service, and nothing to buy. The master file is yours: keep it locally, back it up your way, and share only what you choose.
OCF should improve from real workflows, not only from abstract schema design. If you are using an LLM, editor, exporter, career coach, or hand-written file and you run into a missing capability, send that use case back to the project. You do not need to be a developer. A plain-language example is useful: "I wanted to store both my English and Spanish versions of the same achievement and have tools preserve both."
For ideas, missing capabilities, or "why can't OCF do this?" moments, use the suggestion form at github.com/opencareerformat/opencareerformat/issues/new/choose. For open-ended questions, early ideas, or thanks, use GitHub Discussions.
This homepage is the short version.