Part 3 | Go back to Part 2…
How to write a CV
Curriculum Vitae are a very personal matter and unsurprisingly enough there are many conflicting views on how a cv should be put together. However, most professional recruiters would agree with the following basics.
- Name, address, contact details at the top of the page. Do not put your date of birth in or a photograph. Nothing in the cv must give your age away, it’s the law.
- Have a short summary of your transferable skills, strengths and career objectives.
- Last job first, to include name of company, starting and leaving date if appropriate, job title.
- Each job that you have done must include the following in a bullet point easy to read format:
a) explanation of what the company actually does
b) responsibilities of your job function, with hard information such as staffing levels if relevant etc. You must not assume that the reader will understand acronyms such as ABC
c) achievements. In the time that you did this job what did you achieve, try to put in real numbers or percentage increases.
- The earlier roles that you did you can condense down.
- After the job descriptions you then put in personal matters such as Education, even if its 1 GCSE put it in, it’s an achievement. You would then follow this with details of family, this shows you have responsibilities.
- Then put in information such as citizenship, driving licence and languages.
- Lastly you should put in your hobbies, past times, what you do when you are not working. Team sports, competitive activities are always good. Try to avoid the obvious theatre and cinema listing when you go once a year. It’s too easy to get caught out.
Try to keep it simple (no boxes, frame, lines etc.. to 2 pages of A4 and put the wording in the third person, i.e. do not use the word I . This is a tool designed to get you an interview so don’t be slap dash. Thoroughly check the spelling, grammar and punctuation.