CV Presentation

Your CV is your marketing tool, which should be designed to demonstrate to the employer that you are the right person for the position. It must convey a lot of information in a few words, enabling the employer to instantly assess your suitability. To do so, it must be clearly focused on your abilities, addressing the employer's job requirements, if known, and highlighting your specific suitability for the type of role you are seeking.

Format

Avoid using too much formatting. CVs prepared as a PDF are not generally popular since some companies insist on a Word format. Excessive use of tables and colours is not recommended and try to keep your CV down to 2 pages, whilst utilising the entire width of the page. Keep skill set summaries brief, thereby avoiding a repetition of information in your employment history.

The information is best laid out in the following order:

1. Contact Details

A potential employer must be able to contact you, so include your name, address, phone number(s), and e-mail address.

2. Job Objective/Personal Profile

A brief, 3-4 lines, job objective or personal profile is optional. This is your opportunity to convey your focus, areas of work interest, and express your personality. Your objective should explain the kind of work you want to do.

3. Key Accomplishments

You may add a section that highlights your key accomplishments and achievements.

4. Education

If you are recently qualified, this should be quite detailed (current qualifications first). If you have work experience, this section can be preceded by Work History. This section should include school(s), college(s), university(s) attended (including years of attendance) and qualifications awarded. If you have carried out a final year project, include a title and short description with key techniques used.

5. Work History

This should be in reverse chronological order (current role first). Each position held should include company name, job title, and dates of employment (including both the month and year)

For companies with whom you have spent a long time or where there has been a takeover, buyout, spin-off or change of name please ensure that your length of service is quite clear to see. This may be best achieved by an umbrella statement of your length of service and then detailing below the various roles, company changes and any other relevant information.

It is important for all roles to state what products or markets you were involved with, who the main customer segments were and, for international experience, state the main countries or parts of the world.

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