General Advice

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Your CV should be your own, personal, and a little bit different.

A CV should be constructed on a word-processor, well laid out and printed on a good quality printer. Do use bold and/or underline print for headings. Do not use lots of different font types and sizes. You are not designing a magazine cover! Do use plenty of white space, and a good border round the page. Do use the spell-check on your computer! (Or check that the spelling is correct in some way) Consider using 'bullets' to start sub-sections or lists.

Because you are using a computer or word-processor, you can easily 'customise' your CV if necessary, and change the layout and the way you write your CV for different employers.

Picture yourself to be a busy manager in the employer's office. He (or she) may have to read through 100 CVs in half an hour, and will have two piles - 'possibles' and 'waste-bin'. So yours must be easy to read, short and attractive.

There are two communication principles to remember:

• Keep it simple
• If they didn't hear it, you didn't say it
• When you have written a first attempt at your CV, get someone else to look at it, and tell you how to make it better.
• Ask your friends, your tutors or teachers, your career office, family friends in business. What you have written may seem simple and obvious to you, but not to an employer! Go through it again and again with a red pen, making it shorter, more readable, more understandable!

Before you start
Sit down with a piece of paper. Look at the job(s) that you are applying for. Consider how your skills, education, and experience compare with the skills that the job requires. How much information do you have about the job description?

Sometimes employers do not give enough information. Ask for more detail if needed. Spend time researching detail about the job(s) that interest you and information about the employer - their structure, products, successes, and approach - from:

• Their own publicity, reports and publications
• A library (business reports, trade papers)
• College career office
• Newspaper reports
• The Internet