CV Writing

Your business life story in two pages... the CV

Your CV is effectively a sales document, that you use to sell yourself and your skills to a company and prospective employer. If you do well with the sales document, the result will be an interview, where you get the chance to sell yourself in person for the role that you aspire to have.

This might in itself be a change in how you see your curriculum vitae, but you must see it as a sales document to help you stay on track with how you write and present the information.

The first thing to note is the age old one page or two debate - it does not matter. Some people prefer one page, others prefer two. Bottom line: if you have enough to say without padding that you require two pages, then use two pages. If not, keep the CV to one page. Particularly for graduates going for their first job, there is unlikely to be enough to justify having a second page to your CV.

Now, when it comes to the CV - don't write CV at the top! Have instead your contact details. Then underneath these, in bold letters, you write a summary of who you are in bold. This is the hook that will lead the HR manager to read the rest of your CV.

So, the summary at the top of your CV is important. It has to be relevant, sound impressive and be snappy.

For instance, it might read:

"Experienced project manager with over 10 years track record delivering multi-million pound projects to time and budget"

If you are going for a project manager role, they are sure to read on. So always try to get the keywords from the job title you are going for into the summary at the top - it gives a mental connection to whoever's reading it straight off that you are relevant to the job. And since the company wishlist often asks for several years experience of doing the job they want, then make sure you state this up front.

Then you should have a summary of your business achievements. It is best to work in reverse chronological order so they see your most relevant and most impressive achievements first.

Try to adopt the 70:30 rule: that is you spend 70% of your career history highlighting your most recent job (or two most recent if you have only been in your current role a very short time) then only 30% on the rest of your career history. For anything other than the last two jobs, you should really only have one bullet point.

The hardest thing people find is to let go of past achievements in former jobs, and end up as a result having a long three page CV full of bullet points of what they achieved ten years ago. Don't do it: cut it out.

Also remember to tailor your history slightly for each job so it is obvious there is a match between the skills the job wants and those and the experience that you have to date.

Then after career history add in the education details you have. There is no need for anyone other than perhaps first jobbers to go into too much detail, for instance GCSE results. State the highest qualification you have; if you have a degree state it, the class and the university and of course the subject.

If you have business qualifications state these too, for instance Prince II project management looks good and many employers see it as a nice to have, some even perhaps mandatory depending on the job role that you will be undertaking.

Finally you have your hobbies. Keep it to a line or two and make them sound active - so put things like sport down. Let's be honest, these are largely irrelevant and the selection process will never rise or fall on the hobbies you put down, so you might as well make them interesting and not just reading. They can sometimes be a good 'in' to the interview with you being asked about an unusual hobby such as fire eating as a lead in to the interview proper!

CV Writing

Author: Fred

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Last Updated: Sep 29th 2006

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