English CV
What Is a CV?
Curriculum Vitae is a latin expression loosely translated as (the) course of (my) life. It is an outline of a person's educational and professional history, usually prepared for job applications. Another name for a CV is a resume.
A CV is the most flexible and convenient way to make applications. It conveys your personal details in the way that presents you in the best possible light. A CV is a marketing document in which you are marketing: yourself. You need to "sell" your skills, abilities, qualifications and experience to employers. It can be used to make multiple applications to employers in a specific career area.
There is no "one best way" to construct a CV; it is your document and can be structured as you wish within the basic framework below. It can be on paper or on-line or even on a T-shirt (a gimmicky approach that might work for "creative" jobs but not generally advised!).
When Should a CV Be Used?
When an employer asks for applications to be received in this format
When an employer simply states "apply to..." without specifying the format
When making speculative applications (when writing to an employer who has nod advertise a vacancy but who you hope may have one)
What Information Should a CV Include?
Personal details
Normally these would be your name, address, date of birth (although with age discrimination laws now in force this isn't essential), telephone number and email.
Education and qualifications
Your degree, subject and university. Mention grades unless poor!
Work experience
use action words such as developed, planned and organized
Even work in a shop, bar or restaurant will involve working in a team, providing a quality service to customers, and dealing tactfully with complaints. Don't mention the routine, non-people tasks (cleaning the tables) unless you are applying for a casual summer job in a restaurant or similar.
Try to relate the skills to the job. A finance job will involve numeracy, analytical and problem solving skills so focus on these whereas for a marketing role you would place a bit more emphasis on persuading and negotiating skills.
Interests and achievements
Keep this section short and to the point. As you grow older, your employment record will take precedence and interests will typically diminish greatly in length and importance.
Bullets can be used to separate interests into different types: sporting, creative etc.
Don't use the old boring cliches here: socializing with friends
Don't put many passive, solitary hobbies (reading, watching TV, stamp collecting) or you may be perceived as lacking people skills. If you do put these, then say what you read or watch: "I particularly enjoy Dickens, for the vivid insights you get into life in Victorian times".
Show a range of interests to avoid coming across as narrow: if everything centers around sport they may wonder if you could hold a conversation with a client who wasn't interested in sport.
Hobbies that are a little out of the ordinary can help you to stand out form the crowd: skydiving or mountaineering can show a sense of wanting to stretch yourself and an ability to rely on yourself in demanding situations.
Any interests relevant to the job are worth mentioning: current affairs if you wish to be a journalist; a fantasy share portfolio such as Bullbearings if you want to work in finance.
Any evidence of leadership is important to mention: captain or coach of a sports team, course representative, chair of a student society, scout leader.
Anything showing evidence of employability skills such as teamworking, organizing, planning, persuading, negotiating etc.
Skills
The usual ones to mention are languages (good conversational French, basic Spanish), computing (e.g. "good working knowledge of Microsoft Access and Excel, plus basic web page design skills") and driving ("full current clean driving license").
If you are a mature candidate or have lots of relevant skills to offer, a skills-based CV may work for you.
References
- Normally two referees are sufficient: one academic (perhaps your tutor or a project supervisor) and one from an employer (perhaps your last part-time or summer job).
The order and the emphasis will depend on what you are applying for and what you have to offer.
If you are applying for more than one type of work, you should have a different CV tailored to each career area, highlighting different aspects of your skills and experience.
A personal profile at the start of the CV can work for jobs in competitive industries such as the media or advertising, to help you to stand out from the crowd. If used, it needs to be original and well written. Don't just use the usual hackneyed expressions: "I am an excellent communicator who works well in a team..."
You will also need a covering letter to accompany your CV.
What Makes a Good CV?
There is no single "correct" way to write and present a CV but the following general rules apply:
It is targeted on the specific job or career area for which you are applying and brings out the relevant skills you have to offer.
It is carefully and clearly laid out: logically ordered, easy to read and not cramped.
It is informative but concise.
It is a accurate in content, spelling and grammar. If you mention attention to detail as a skill, make sure your spelling and grammar is perfect!
If your CV is written backwards on pink polka-dot paper and it gets you regular interviews, it's a good CV! The bottom line is that if it's producing results don't change it too much but if it's not, keep changing it until it does.
If it's not working, ask people to look at it and suggest changes.
How Long Should a CV Be?
There are no absolute rules but, in general, a new graduate's CV should cover no more than two sides of A4 paper.
If you can summarize your career history comfortably on a single side, this is fine and has advantages when you are making speculative applications and need to put yourself across concisely. However, you should not leave out important items, or crowd your text too closely together in order to fit it onto that single side. Academic and technical CVs may be much longer: up to 4 or 5 sides.
Tips on Presentation
Be concise
A CV is an appetizer and should not give the reader indigestion. Don't feel that you have to list every exam you have ever taken, or every activity you have ever been involved in - consider which are the most relevant and/or impressive. The best CVs tend to be fairly economical with words, selecting the most important information and leaving a little something for the interview: the are an appetizer rather than the main course. Good business communications tend to be short and to the point, focusing on key facts and your CV should to some extent emulate this.
Be positive
Put yourself over confidently and highlight your strong points. For example, when listing your A-levels, put your highest grade first.
Be honest
Although a CV does allow you to omit details (such as exam result) which you would prefer the employer not to know about, you should never give inaccurate or misleading information. CVs are not legal documents and you can't be held liable for anything within, but if a recruiter picks up a suggestion of falsehoods you will be rapidly rejected.
The sweet spot of a CV is the area selectors tend to pay most attention to
This is typically around the upper middle of the first page, so make sure that this are contains essential information.
If you are posting your CV, don't fold it - put it in a full-size A4 envelope so that it doesn't arrive creased.
Fonts
TIMES NEW ROMAN is the standard windows "serif" font. A safe bet - law firms seem to like it!
A more interesting serif font might be GEORGIA.
ARIAL is the standard windows "sans" font. Sans fonts don't have the curly bits on letters. As you can see they're cleaner and more modern that Times or Georgia and also look larger in the same "point" size (the point size is simply how big the letters are on the page.) However Arial and Times New Roman are so common that they're a little boring to the eye.
A more classy choice might be VERDANA which has wider letters than most fonts, or GENEVA - these are both common sans fonts. Don't use Comic Sans!
FONT SIZE is normally 12 points for the normal font with larger sizes for subheadings and headings. 14 points it too big for the normal body font - wastes space and looks crude, and 8 or 9 points too small to be easily readable by everyone, especially in Times New Roman which should not be used in sizes less than 11 points.
Although many people use 12 points, some research on this suggested that smaller point size CVs were perceived as more intellectual!
Most CVs are now read on screen rather than on paper. It's no coincidence that Serif fonts are rarely used on the web - they are much less readable on screen, and some fonts, such as Verdana, were designed with screen readability in mind.
Different Types of CV
Chronological
Outlining your career history in date order, normally beginning with the most recent items (reverse chronological). This is the "conventional" approach and the easiest to prepare. It is detailed, comprehensive and biographical and usually works well for "traditional" students with a good all-round mixture of education and work experience. Mature students, however, may not benefit from this approach, which does emphasize your age, any career breaks and work experience which has little surface relevance to the posts you are applying for now.
Skills-based
Highly-focused CVs which relate your skills and abilities to a specific job or career area by highlighting these skills and your major achievements. The factual, chronological details of your education and work history are subordinate. These work well for mature graduates and for anybody whose degree subject and work experience is not directly relevant to their application. Skills-based CVs should be closely targeted to a specific job.
Targeting Your CV
If your CV is to be sent to an individual employer which has requested applications in this format, you should research the organization and the position carefully.
In the present competitive job market, untargeted CVs tend to lose out those that have been written with a particular role in mind. For example, a marketing CV will be very different from a teaching CV. The marketing CV will focus on persuading, negotiating and similar skills where as the teaching CV will focus more on presenting and listening skills and evidence for these.
If your CV is to be used for speculative application, it is still important to target it - at the very least, on the general career area in which you want to work. Even if you are using the same CV for a number of employers, you should personalize the covering letter - e.g. by putting in a paragraph on why you want to work for that organization.
Tailor Your CV to the Job Description
Avoid using the same CV for every job opportunity regardless of the industry or job title;
Fine tune for keyword hits;
Recent grads: Focus on college highlights;
Mid-career workers: Point up your value;
Late-career workers: Play up leadership skills.
Emailed CVs and Web CVs
Put your covering letter as the body of your email. It's wise to format it as plain text as then it can be read by any email reader.
Emails are not as easy to read as letters. Stick to simple text with short paragraph and plenty of spacing. Break messages into points and make each one a new paragraph with a full line gap between paragraphs, Don't "shout": write in upper case!
Your CV is sent as an attachment. Say you'll send a printed CV if required.
PDF (portable document format) is perhaps becoming the most widely used form now. There are PDF-readers for all platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux). This also guarantees that the CV will look the same, no matter what reader is used to view the document. Modern versions of Microsoft Word contain a PDF export function or you can download a free PDF converter.
You can also use Microsoft Word (.doc) format, however .doc format is not guaranteed to be compatible among different version of Microsoft Word, so a CV might look garbled when opened with an outdated or newer version of Word. Also .doc files may not easily open on computers using Linux and Apple platforms. .doc-files may also contain sensitive information such as previous versions of a document perhaps leading to embarrassment. Microsoft Word documents can contain macro viruses, so some employers may not open these. Send the CV in .doc (Word 2003) format, rather than .docx (Word 2010) format, as not everyone has upgraded to Word 2010, or downloaded the free file converter.
Rich Text Format (.rtf), or html (web page format) are other alternatives.
If in doubt send your CV in several formats. Email it back to yourself first to check it, as line lengths may be changed by your email reader.
Web CVs and Electronically Scanned CVs
Web CVs use HTML format. You can include the web address in an email or letter to an employer. The have the advantage that you can easily use graphics, color, hyperlinks and even sound, animation and video. The basic rules still apply however - make it look professional. They can be very effective if you are going for multimedia, web design or computer games job where they can demonstrate your technical skills along with your portfolio.
Electronically scanned CVs have been used by Nortel, Ford and others. Resumix is one package used for this: it has artificial intelligence which reads the text and extracts important information such as work, education, skills.