How To Write A Successful CV Or Resume
What is a CV or Resume?
A Curriculum Vitae or Resume, is the story of your professional life, from the time you went to school and university, to professional training and right up to your current or last job. Curriculum Vitae literally means: life story and is used as your key tool for applying for jobs; without a CV or Resume, you won't get one! And, like any good story, it should have a beginning, middle and end. Follow the guide to the layout detailed below and you will have a professional CV, that is easy to follow and manage.
So what should a CV or Resume include?
The following points are things essential to a successful CV:
- Personal Details
Your name
Postal Address
Email Address
Home telephone number
Mobile number
- Your Profile
It's easier and quicker for a prospective employer to read bullet points, so add up to 10 points discussing critical aspects of your achievements, profession, training, education. Each item should be short and to the point.
- Career Skills
Your CV is the story of your professional life and it has to look good and say the right things to get you noticed. Imagine it's a web page - use the same principles as meta tags or keywords; if your CV contains all the right keywords, it will make it so much easier for a recruiter to identify your experience from all the other hundreds of CV’s submitted for the same position. This becomes even more relevant when the recruiter is relying on job search engines to find suitable applicants for specific vacancies.
The easiest and best way to build a Skills Profile, is to add specific types of skills to a table; easily done using MS Word. Skills are specific job requisites; for instance, if you are an HR Specialist, you would probably add: Personnel Management, Staff Development and Training, CIPD Qualified (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), and so on. If you are a Management Accountant, you might add: ACMA (Ass. Chartered Institute of Management Accountants), Degree in Economics, or Finance or Accounting or other similar subjects, Month End Accounting, Year End Procedures, Staff Management, Bespoke Accounting Software Implementation, etc... Use your common sense as well as your creative skills. It might help if you wrote out a list of things that you do on a regular basis throughout your job role, once you've done this, you can arrange them in level of importance and then go on to add them to your table. Take a look at some of our Free CV Samples.
- Professional Experience or Employment History
Details of your employment history should always be added starting with your current or last position and working backwards, right back to your first job. Dates have to be accounted for on a CV or Resume. All the details of what your job(s) entail are important, but only in so far as they relate to your chosen field or career. For instance, if your first job was as a Receptionist, but for the last 10 years you have been working as a Senior Secretary, then the details of the first job are not so important, so you could add a sentence about how many lines your switchboard operated, what kind of business the company was involved in and whether there was any administrative work involved.
Your current or most recent job will be most important and the responsibilities should be set in the same level of priority as the job you are applying for. It is very important to note that every time you submit your CV or Resume to a job application, you must amend the CV or Resume to match the job requirements. It sounds laborious, but it is essential if you are to be successful, particularly if you are applying through job search engines. Job search engines categorise every CV and Resume by the level of skills, professional training and level of education. If the CV or Resume is incorrectly written, you may not get any referrals, or it could be that you receive thousands of job referrals each week.........you need to make sure that your CV lists, by keyword, the skills of the job for which you are applying or seeking. In other words, there has to be similarity between what you listed in your Career Skills and what you've outlined in your Career History.
As well as adding what your job entails, you should also highlight areas of achievement, promotion or good work. It is incredibly important that you stick to the facts, do not ever state how good or clever you think you are; your opinion of yourself is completely irrelevant and if an employer is to reach an opinion of the particularly good skills that you possess, then he or she will reach their own conclusion in their own time. The one thing a prospective employer should not feel is disappointment in that you don't live up to what your CV says!
- Education and/or Training
If you are a recent graduate or school leaver, then your education is very important at this point, so substitute Professional Experience or your Employment History with details of your education, college, university and any professional qualifications. For those job seekers with more than 12 months experience, your Education, Training and other data should follow your Professional Experience or Employment History.
Add the most recent first to complement your Professional Experience or Employment History. Add the College or University, the date of the qualification was achieved and the title of the qualification. Follow this layout to your Secondary Education, you don't need to give specific details, unless you are a recent graduate or school leaver.
- Interests and/or Hobbies
What you do in your spare time is of interest and value to a prospective employer as it may help them the gauge how you might fit in with other employees. Not only that, it gives insight into your personality and lends a little character to your CV or Resume.
- I T Skills
This point is very important as basic IT proficiency is essential these days. Also, specific IT skills are highly sought after in specific areas of commerce. Make sure you list your basic office IT skills and highlight bespoke or industry specific IT Skills.
- References
It's always better to add: "Available upon request". By adding each of your referees can lengthen the CV or Resume and give the false indication that the CV or Resume is longer than it actually is.
Don't forget to add whether you have a current driving licence, whether that licence is clean and whether you have access to a car/vehicle.
General Advice
Stick to the facts.
Don't tell lies.
Use bullet points for each sentence or item.
Keep sentences short and to the point.
Keep to the same context in sentences within the same bullet point.
Always check your grammar, (the green wavy lines).
Always run a spell check, (the red wavy lines); there is nothing more disastrous than shooting yourself in the foot by not checking what you've written.........especially if attention to detail is required for the kind of work you do or would like to do!
Cosmetic Features
Always try to make your CV smart and professional. Whatever you do, don't add lots of graphics and images and arrows and so on.....it disrupts the reading pattern and is very distracting when trying to read the content. It's fine to add a background, you could also add a watermark, but you need to make sure that the content of the CV or Resume is clear and not blocked out by any dark images within the background or watermark. You can add limited amounts of colour to differentiate between the different sections of the CV, i.e. instead of using using black, you could make each segment title blue (or some other colour that you like), and underline it to make it stand out. It is important to be a little bit creative with your CV to make it unique and individualistic, so that it looks different to other CV's and makes a good impression. CV's and Resumes that stand out, get noticed and are much more successful than bland, black and white documents.
If you feel that composing a professional CV or Resume is too difficult or you really don't know what to write, try using the questionnaire in our CV Builder Service. Simply fill in the information in the boxes required, print it off and then copy and past the answers onto an MS Word document. If you find you are still unable to produce a CV or Resume that you are happy with, contact us and we will try to provide more specific advice........failing that, you could opt to buy one of our paid CV Writing Services.
Contact us for more help and advice
Telephone:
02381 785282
Email:
Copyright (c) The Filmore CV 2014
