How to write a great CV

Your CV is your agent, it will open doors for you and introduce you to people without you having to do a thing. But in order for this to happen you need to put some thought in first.

•  What type of job do you want?

•  What do you have experience in?

•  How can you sell yourself?

Make a list of your skills (things you’ve learned), abilities (things you can do naturally) and experiences (what you’ve done). So you might be a science graduate, a problem solver and have done some volunteering at university. Great! Now to order the information.

You want the information you give to be no longer than two sides of typed A4. You can order the information into bullet points which will make it easier for the person looking at it to scan through. Make sure you include your successes and include a short breakdown of what you did in each role. Don’t leave any time periods unaccounted for.

The main sections to include in your CV:

Personal details:

The usual - name, address, phone number and email address if you have one. Make sure this is professional enough - not an embarrassing nickname!

Career profile:

This is an increasingly common section to add into your CV. Use a few lines to detail what work you’ve done so far in your career, and where you hope to go. If you’re not sure where you want to go with any certainty you can talk about the area in which you hope to work - in finance, being a team leader or simply gaining more skills.

Employment history:

Start from your current job (if you’re in employment, most recent if not) and work backwards. List your job title, dates you were there and then add two to four bullet points of your duties. Also include any successes –

“Undertook a project to get a website designed and built for the company at a very competitive rate. Currently manage the website’s content and deliver training to colleagues in how to add content.”

Education and skills:

List these in reverse chronological order and also put in any training you’ve had - for example Health and Safety or even things like time management training. You don’t have to go as far back as your SATs or Richmond Test results, just think about what is relevant to the type of job you are going for. You could say “7 GSCEs grade A-C” for example, which is much shorter than listing them all.

Referees: Choose two people who know you well and who will talk about you positively. Ideally this should be a current boss (or a recent one will do) and someone else who knows you in a professional capacity - perhaps a former colleague or a tutor from school/college/university.

Make sure you check through the CV a few times to weed out any spelling mistakes. In fact, it’s usually best to ask a friend or parent to do this as it can be hard to spot them when you’ve been working on it for a while.

And finally, please don’t be tempted to bend the truth or exaggerate. Suspiciously impressive statements will attract attention for the wrong reasons!