How to Write a CV if You Have Little or No Work Experience.
A guide for students and recent graduates on writing effective CVs, covering letters and application forms.
Vlad Mackevic, #1 best-selling Amazon Kindle author (College and University section)
So, you are applying for a job. Perhaps the employer has asked for a CV or perhaps you need to fill in an application form. You are a student, or a fresh graduate with not too much serious experience and you are not quite sure how to show your potential employer that you're brilliant.
This book is what you need. It teaches you to write brilliant, effective, impact-making CVs. The book answers several very important questions:
- What skills are almost all employers looking for?
- How do you present yourself professionally?
- How can you extract valuable information from the little work experience you've got?
- How do you present your work experience so that it looks impressive?
- What should you do if you've never had a paid job?
- What is more important - the duties or the achievements?
- How do you write covering letters and application forms that will get you interviews?
What is more, this book gives you advice on how to get work experience and what counts as work experience.
Extract from the book (published with the author's permission)
The purpose of your CV is to get you an interview, not a job. This means that you need to impress your potential employers and make them interested.
Please also remember that you will need to write a CV in response to a job advertisement. These usually contain two documents: the job description with a list of tasks and the person specification with a list of skills and qualities that an ideal candidate for that job should have. The contents of your CV will depend on the contents of these two documents.
So, here are the main elements that CVs are made of, from the top to the bottom:
1. Your Name and Surname at the top, in a larger font. DO NOT write 'Curriculum Vitae' or 'CV'. Your potential employer knows that they are reading a CV. There is no need to tell them that.
2. Your contact details: your address and postcode, telephone number and email address.
3. Your Personal Profile (optional). I will write more about it in Chapter 5: Personal Profile.
4. Education. Here is your first chance to shine and stand out. See more in Chapter 6: Education and How to Talk about It.
5. Skills. In a skills-based CV, the Skills section precedes the Work Experience section and is very large. In an experience-based CV, the Skills section is much smaller: it only contains 'hard skills' such as languages, numeracy and IT and comes after the Work Experience section.
There are many skills that you can present in your CV. The main ones are:
- Communication (spoken and written); this includes writing and presentation skills
- Commercial awareness (knowing how businesses operate)
- Customer Service
- Teamwork (all about co-operation and helping others)
- Planning and Organising
- Motivation and Working on your own initiative
- Information Technology and Computer Literacy (including internet-based research skills)
- Languages
- Leadership - this one deserves a separate discussion and I will address this skill in Chapter 8. In short, a leader is not just a manager. A leader is someone who is able to spot a problem before anyone else does, and takes the necessary steps to solve it.
- Willingness to Learn
When you mention your skills, they should be accompanied by specific examples and evidence demonstrating that you, indeed, possess them.
6. Work Experience. Chapter 7 will explain why you don't even need a job to build a great CV because it is enough to be socially active at university.
