A CV (or Curriculum Vitae as it is in full), is a summarised history of your contact information, qualifications, employment record, skills, experience and interests. Since it will represent you to employers, it is essential that your CV is coherent, complete and professional-looking.
There are a number of schools of thought about what constitutes a good CV but here is a basic formula. It needs to contain the following information:
- Name
- Address
- Phone number
- Email (make sure it is the current one – people often change their email and forget to update their CV’s and thus don’t receive interview offers)
- Qualifications (play down GCSE’s if you have a degree or if you left school more than about 10 years ago)
- Employment (in reverse chronological order – employers are more interested in your most recent jobs)
- Other skills (e.g. driving licence)
These constitute the very minimum that should be covered. A good and effective CV must also be presented so that it is:
- Laser-printed (or at least done on a good inkjet printer)
- Tabulated and clearly set out
- Not occupying more than two pages (over-running defeats the object and more than 3 pages is a definite no-no)
It can also contain:
- Date of birth (you are not legally obliged to divulge this on your CV)
- Hobbies and interests (employers have no right to ask but most like to know how you spend your spare time)
- Details of referees (sometimes these are best held back until you have a provisional job offer, thus it can be better to put ‘Referees’ details supplied on request’)
- Personal profile – a statement saying plainly what your best qualities are, the goals you hope to achieve in life and generally a couple of facts about what makes you ‘you’.
- Personal achievements – any particular attributes e.g. things that you were particularly good at in a recent job
Always put your name and, ideally, contact phone number on every page. Quite often CV’s are pulled apart so that they can be copied or passed around offices. As a result, it is easy for them to get separated in such a way that no-one knows what goes with what. Don’t take that chance.
CV’s are useful for more than just job applications so keep one with you if you are looking for work online or making exploratory phone calls to companies. That way you won’t flounder while you try to remember exactly when you were in a particular job or gained a specific qualification. You will also be consistent in what you tell employers.
Take a spare copy or two with you when you go for an interview. It can happen that the interviewer forgets to bring your CV along and it looks extremely efficient if you are able to say magnanimously, “No problem, take this one,” and hand over a spare copy you have brought ‘just in case’.
Go through your CV while you are waiting to be called in for the interview so that the information is fresh in your mind.
Finally, you need to be objective and critical over your CV. Find a friend who can play a potential new boss and get them to go through it for you. If they do it properly, they are bound to turn up a few snags.
Don’t forget that, like you, your CV is a living thing and it needs to be regularly updated and also allowed to evolve and adapt.
