Your professional history. Organized, private, and always accessible.

Career Vault is a lightweight, self-hosted PHP web application designed for professionals who want to maintain their complete career history, supporting documents, projects, qualifications, achievements, and professional records in one secure and organized place.

Instead of keeping offer letters in email, payslips on an old computer, certificates in cloud folders, project details in spreadsheets, and employment information scattered across multiple locations, Career Vault provides a single private workspace for maintaining the records behind your professional career.

It also provides controlled, read-only access for authorized HR professionals and recruiters when career information or supporting documents need to be reviewed.

About Career Vault

Career Vault works as a personal career record and professional document vault.

As your career grows, so does the amount of information associated with it. Company details, employment dates, projects, technologies, certifications, recommendations, payslips, experience letters, and other records can quickly become difficult to manage.

Career Vault provides a structured way to maintain this information throughout your career.

You can maintain:

  • Personal and professional profile
  • Employment experience
  • Education history
  • Professional certifications
  • Project history
  • Technologies and skills
  • Achievements
  • Professional recommendations
  • Career-related documents
  • Offer and joining letters
  • Payslips
  • Experience and relieving letters
  • Certificates and supporting documents
  • Other professional records

Career Vault is intentionally designed to remain lightweight and focused.

It is not an HRMS, recruitment CRM, applicant tracking system, job portal, payroll application, or enterprise document-management platform.

Its purpose is simple:

Record, organize, preserve, and selectively share your professional history.

Why Use Career Vault?

A CV usually represents only a small summary of a professional career.

Behind those few pages may be years of employment records, projects, technologies, certifications, achievements, recommendations, and supporting documents.

As the years pass, remembering and locating all of this information becomes increasingly difficult.

Career Vault gives those records a permanent, structured home.

Keep Your Career History Organized

Maintain your complete professional journey in one application instead of relying on unrelated folders, spreadsheets, emails, and cloud-storage locations.

Career Vault helps preserve information that may otherwise become difficult to remember after several years.

Employment Experience

Maintain a structured history of your previous and current employment.

Employment records can be used to preserve important details about each position together with the documents associated with that employment.

This can be particularly useful when:

  • Updating your CV
  • Completing employment forms
  • Preparing for interviews
  • Changing jobs
  • Providing background-verification information
  • Reviewing your previous career history

Instead of reconstructing your employment timeline every time it is requested, the information remains available in Career Vault.

Career Documents

Important employment documents are often scattered across years of emails, computers, and cloud-storage accounts.

Career Vault provides a dedicated location for maintaining documents such as:

  • Offer letters
  • Appointment letters
  • Joining letters
  • Payslips
  • Promotion letters
  • Salary revision letters
  • Experience letters
  • Relieving letters
  • Certificates
  • Recommendations
  • Supporting career documents

Documents remain associated with your professional records, making them significantly easier to locate later.

Education

Maintain your academic history alongside your professional experience.

Education records can include qualifications and their associated supporting documents, allowing Career Vault to become a long-term archive rather than simply an employment-history application.

Certifications

Professional certifications can be maintained together with relevant details and supporting documents.

This provides a useful reference when preparing:

  • CVs
  • Job applications
  • Skills matrices
  • Client proposals
  • Professional profiles
  • Background-verification information

Projects

A long professional career can include dozens of projects.

After several years, remembering exactly what you worked on, when you worked on it, and what your involvement was can become difficult.

Career Vault provides a structured project history that can later help when preparing CVs, portfolios, interviews, proposals, or professional profiles.

Technologies and Skills

Career Vault provides a dedicated area for maintaining technologies and professional skills accumulated throughout your career.

This becomes particularly useful for experienced professionals who have worked with many technologies across different employers and projects.

Rather than trying to reconstruct your technical history years later, Career Vault can act as your personal reference.

Achievements

Important professional achievements can be preserved as part of your career history.

These records can later help when preparing performance summaries, professional profiles, portfolios, CV updates, or interview discussions.

Professional Recommendations

Maintain professional recommendations and references alongside the rest of your career information.

This keeps valuable professional feedback from becoming lost across old emails, messages, documents, and professional networks.

One Login for All Roles

Career Vault provides a single login interface.

Administrators and authorized HR/recruiter users use the same login page.

After authentication, Career Vault automatically identifies the user’s role and permissions and displays only the dashboard options and records that user is authorized to access.

There is no need for separate Admin and HR login pages.

Controlled HR & Recruiter Access

One of Career Vault’s important features is the ability to provide controlled access to professional information.

Instead of repeatedly emailing sensitive documents to different people, authorized HR or recruiter accounts can be created with appropriate permissions.

HR/recruiter access is designed primarily for viewing and verification.

The administrator retains control over what information is available.

This makes Career Vault useful during:

  • Recruitment
  • Background verification
  • Employment verification
  • Documentation reviews
  • Credential verification
  • Professional record reviews

Access can also be restricted or withdrawn when it is no longer required.

Role & Permission-Based Access

Career Vault does not rely simply on hiding menu items.

Application access is controlled according to the authenticated user’s role and permissions.

The administrator maintains the Career Vault, while authorized HR/recruiter users receive access only to permitted areas.

This helps keep management functions separate from verification access.

Career Timeline

Career Vault brings individual career records together into a structured professional timeline.

Employment, education, certifications, projects, and other milestones collectively provide a clearer picture of a person’s professional journey.

For professionals with many years of experience, this can become a valuable historical reference.

PDF Reports

Career information can be presented through PDF reports when a portable representation of professional records is required.

This provides an additional way to review or share structured career information while Career Vault remains the primary source of maintained records.

Audit Logs

Career Vault includes audit logging to provide visibility into important application activity.

Audit records can help administrators review account and application activity and provide an additional layer of accountability for a system containing professional information.

Admin Account Management

The administrator is not permanently tied to the credentials entered during installation.

Career Vault provides account-management functionality for maintaining administrator information, including:

  • Administrator name
  • Administrator email
  • Password changes
  • Current-password verification
  • Duplicate-email validation

Sensitive account changes are handled securely and relevant activity can be recorded in the audit log.

Privacy and Control

Career Vault is a self-hosted application.

It is installed on your own compatible PHP/MySQL hosting environment.

You retain control over:

  • Application files
  • Database
  • Career records
  • Uploaded documents
  • Administrator account
  • HR/recruiter accounts
  • Permissions
  • Hosting environment
  • Backups

Career Vault therefore does not require you to maintain your professional archive inside a third-party career-storage platform.

For production use, HTTPS and regular backups are strongly recommended.

Lightweight by Design

Career Vault deliberately avoids unnecessary enterprise functionality.

There are no complicated recruitment pipelines, employee-management modules, payroll engines, messaging systems, or large HR workflows.

The application focuses on:

Record → Organize → Store → Review → Share

This helps keep Career Vault straightforward to install, understand, host, and maintain.

Key Features

Career Vault includes:

  • Professional profile management
  • Employment experience management
  • Education records
  • Certification records
  • Project history
  • Technologies and skills
  • Achievements
  • Professional recommendations
  • Career document management
  • Payslip and employment-document storage
  • Protected document access
  • Unified login for all roles
  • Role-aware dashboard
  • HR/recruiter access
  • Permission-based authorization
  • Career timeline
  • PDF reports
  • Audit logs
  • Administrator account management
  • Secure authentication
  • Login-attempt protection
  • Session security
  • Responsive interface
  • Mobile-friendly login
  • Web-based installer
  • Server requirement checks

Technologies Used

Career Vault is built using established web technologies and a lightweight server-rendered architecture.

Backend

PHP
Used for the core application logic, authentication, permissions, forms, document handling, reporting, and server-side functionality.

MySQL / MariaDB
Used for structured application data including users, professional records, permissions, configuration, and audit information.

PDO – PHP Data Objects
Used for database connectivity and prepared database queries.

PHP Sessions
Used for authentication and secure application-session management.

Frontend

HTML5
Used for semantic application structure, forms, navigation, tables, and content.

CSS3
Used for the application’s custom responsive interface and white, black, and pastel visual system.

JavaScript
Used for lightweight client-side interactions and interface behaviour.

Bootstrap
Used for responsive layout and reusable UI components. Bootstrap assets are included locally with the application rather than requiring an external CDN.

Bootstrap Icons
Used for interface iconography.

Security Features

Career Vault may contain sensitive professional and employment documents, so security has been considered throughout the application.

Security measures include:

  • Secure password hashing
  • PDO prepared statements
  • CSRF protection
  • POST-only destructive actions
  • Session ID regeneration after authentication
  • Session inactivity timeout
  • Secure session-cookie configuration
  • HttpOnly session cookies
  • SameSite cookie protection
  • Login-attempt throttling
  • Role-based authorization
  • Permission-based HR/recruiter access
  • Server-side file validation
  • MIME-type validation
  • Randomized uploaded filenames
  • Protected upload directories
  • Controlled document delivery
  • Document-access restrictions
  • Audit logging
  • Current-password verification for sensitive administrator changes

HTTPS should always be enabled when Career Vault is deployed in a production environment.

Server Requirements

Career Vault is designed to work with a standard PHP/MySQL web-hosting environment.

Required

  • Apache web server or compatible PHP hosting
  • PHP 8.1 or later
  • MySQL 5.7+ or compatible MariaDB
  • PDO extension
  • PDO MySQL extension
  • Fileinfo extension
  • PHP Sessions
  • JSON support
  • PHP file uploads enabled
  • Writable upload directories
  • .htaccess support when hosted with Apache

Recommended

For production installations:

  • PHP 8.2+
  • MySQL 8.0+ or current compatible MariaDB
  • HTTPS / SSL certificate
  • Apache with mod_rewrite
  • 128 MB or higher PHP memory limit
  • Appropriate upload_max_filesize
  • Appropriate post_max_size
  • Regular database backups
  • Regular uploaded-document backups

Storage requirements primarily depend on the quantity and size of career documents uploaded to the system.

Web-Based Installation

Career Vault includes a guided web installer.

The installer checks important server requirements before installation and helps configure the application and database.

A typical installation involves:

  1. Upload Career Vault to the web server.
  2. Create an empty MySQL/MariaDB database.
  3. Open the application URL.
  4. Launch the installer.
  5. Review server requirement checks and passed/failed status.
  6. Enter database details.
  7. Configure the administrator account.
  8. Complete installation.
  9. Sign in through the unified login page.
  10. Begin building your Career Vault.

No command-line deployment or frontend build process is required for a standard installation.

Who Is Career Vault For?

Career Vault can be useful for professionals across many industries, including:

  • Software developers
  • Technical architects
  • Engineers
  • Designers
  • Consultants
  • Managers
  • Freelancers
  • Contractors
  • Business professionals
  • Technical professionals
  • Professionals with long employment histories
  • Professionals who frequently undergo employment verification

The longer a career becomes, the more useful a structured professional archive can become.

More Than a CV

Career Vault is not intended to replace your CV.

A CV is designed to summarize your career.

Career Vault maintains the records behind that summary.

Your CV might contain only:

Technical Lead — Company XYZ — 2022–2025

Behind those few words may be projects, responsibilities, technologies, certifications, achievements, recommendations, offer letters, payslips, promotion records, experience letters, and other professional documents.

Career Vault provides a private place to preserve that history.

Your career is built over years. Your professional records shouldn’t remain scattered across them.

Career Vault gives your professional journey one organized, private and controlled home.