What Makes a Good CV?
June 25th, 2008 | by admin |Follow these few steps to dramatically improve the quality of your CV:
- Keep it simple, uncluttered and in an easy-to-read font (on plain white A4 paper).
- Keep it free from unnecessary details (e.g.: don’t write lines upon lines for your interests!)
- Keep it free from spelling/grammatical errors - maybe ask someone to proof read it.
- Check your personal details - sound obvious but it does happen (wrong phone number etc).
- If you have a job spec - match your CV to this to ensure you have included relevant skills.
- Believe it or not - there is no perfect CV. Just concentrate on making use of the kind of CV design that suits you best - chronological, functional or a combination of the two.
…but what should my CV include?
- Education details - you don’t need to include all your qualifications from 10 years ago. State your most recent qualifications and briefly cover older, less relevant ones
- Work experience: most recent first and go backwards; unless using a functional CV
- Key skills/areas of expertise: such as IT skills or languages
- Extra-curricular activities if relevant to job being applied for!!
- It would be ideal to include your mobile telephone number. There is a good chance you could miss a call if not at home. Also, and again, this sounds obvious - make sure you have a professional message on your answer phone - you never know who could call!
- When emailing your CV, please take your email address into consideration. We regularly see CVs with email addresses along the lines of “lovedoctor@emailaddress.com” or “sexylady123@sillyemail.co.uk” - this will not help present a professional reflection of you. Consider obtaining a free email account from Hotmail or Yahoo and keep job application emails separate from personal email.
- If you are sending your CV by post, ensure you use an A4 envelope and do not fold your CV - by the time it gets to it’s destination it could look a mess.
Source: www.thecvstore.net