HOW TO WRITE A CV

As soon as we finish our studies, if not sooner, we search for our dream job. However, we often stumble upon unjustified requirements from potential employers regarding past working experience. It seems like a dilemma: how are you expected to get a job when everyone demands that in order to get one you must already have had one? These people fail to acknowledge the fact that – unfortunately as it is – nobody is actually born with a working experience. It is something we are to gain when we already have the job, and not before, right? Well, yes, but...

It is important to realize what exactly the hiring manager want to read in a candidate's CV. When they state that they are looking for someone with working experience, the key word here is “experience,” and not “working.” Basically, the potential employer is interested to know what makes you the ultimate candidate for the job in terms of your past experiences that are relevant to the position. Surely, you did have a lot of different experiences in your life. It is hard to imagine a person in their 20s that has been doing literally nothing up to this point and gained absolutely no experiences in any field whatsoever.

Moreover, there must be a reason why you want this particular job. You believe that this is the perfect job for you because of your wonderful personal traits, the set of skills that you possess, and – most importantly – your zeal and enthusiasm. These are the things that need to be clearly presented in your killer CV, so that your employer had no doubts about your qualification for the position. Let's go into more detail on that:

1. Terminology

If you apply for a certain job, then surely you must deem yourself fit it and you are fluent in this field's professional language which every trade has. So, you should demonstrate it by using this terminology all through the text of your CV.

A wise use of job-specific terminology will reveal your competence in the topic, and the good command of professional language is a good means to substantiate your qualification for the job.

2. Skills upfront

There are no strict rules telling you to list your skills at the end of your CV, thus hiding them from the reader's attention. Yet, this is exactly what many people do with their CV, for unknown reasons.

If you don't have so much working experience, then this is your weak point, this is something you would not like to attract too much attention to. Your stronger point here, something that you should attract the reader's attention to, is your set of skills. List them upfront, at the beginning of your CV. Focus on why these skills make you the perfect candidate.

If you are still not sure on how to write your CV skill-based, you are welcome to google it and find examples of such CV online.

3. Personal traits

Motivation and enthusiasm are good things, but merely listing them will look trivial and generic on your CV. It will not convince anybody. What you can do here is illustrate these traits with examples from your life.

For example, you have come up with some creative ways to cut your use of electricity, water, gas, etc., thus saving on communal payments. Then, you have gathered some of your neighbors at the table and told them thereof (which means that you have shared an experience in an organized way). Why not write about it to highlight both your skill to optimize costs and to share experiences with a group of people? It does show how enthusiastic you are, how well you get along with people in your community, and how you can attract attention when you need to be listened to. For many positions, the possession of such skills is quite a bonus. You can even give a detailed view on the amount of saved resource.

If you prove that you can present yourself and your skills in an irresistible way, you will not only convince the reader of your possession of your skills but also about your ability to present yourself, which is a valuable skill too.

4. You existing experience

As mentioned before, the focus in the experience section does not necessarily need to be on the working. Clearly, before you went looking for a job, you lived a life full of various experiences of different kinds. So, you should sort out those that are relevant for that dream job of yours and list them under the experiences section of your CV. Some school projects, community and/or volunteer involvement, personal projects, or even an online research on the topic can be of relevance here.

5. Formatting

Be reminded that the text of your CV must be engaging to the reader – your future employer. Among the most common means to make a text more readable are:

- shorter sentences over complex ones;

- active voice over passive;

- facts over generalizations.

Apart from these, it is important to remember that there are no strict rules to format your CV. So, you can be creative about it and invent a way to group and structure the data yourself. For example, you can group it by relevance with the more important skills and projects being on top.

Basically, you are free to experiment and play with the layout up until the point where you yourself feel proud just by looking at your CV.

As you can see, putting up a convincing CV without having a substantial working experience to speak of is not as challenging as it sounds. And neither is starting your professional career from scratch. So, don't let the seeming obstacles disappoint you before you even begin.

Remember that you do have some aces up your sleeve. Following the humble advice from this article should help you to put them to good use when appealing to the hiring manager and convincing them that you are the perfect candidate for the job.

 

 SEE Also: 18-common interview questions tips