CV Writing Advice

Include your name, address, telephone numbers, both landline and mobile and email address in order for any interested employers can contact you easily.

Tell potential employers, in hard facts, what your key achievements are. Perhaps you've made £1m of savings or designed a product that sold £10m, what ever it is, make it tangible. This provides potential employers a very good reason to read more of your CV. 

Once again this paragraph should grab the attention of the reader and entice them to find out more about you. Be careful not to pack too much information into this paragraph, instead ensure to highlight your main skills and relate it to the position you are applying for to show the employers why you meet their needs.

In reverse chronological order, detail your academic and professional qualifications along with the grades you achieved and where you achieved them.

Whether you realise it or not, you will have gained many skills over the years, some tangible, some less so. Include every IT package or programme you have used both universally recognised and in-house as well as any foreign language skills and state whether you’re at a basic, intermediate or advanced level. Skills such as communication and project management are harder to substantiate therefore these should be evidenced by examples.

List your most recent position first, continuing in reverse chronological order, including dates, name, position held and website for each company you have worked for. Use bullets points and not paragraphs wherever possible to highlight your responsibilities and achievements in each role. This will enable the person reading your CV to quickly match up your experience with their job description.

Including these is optional and are often used to fill up space at the end of the document. The idea is to give the interviewer a more rounded picture and maybe something more personal to discuss at an interview. That said, if you are looking for employment within the motorsport industry, for example, then it would be a good idea to state an interest in motorsport.

It’s not critical that you list references on your CV, however you should state that details are available on request. If this is your first job, it is a good idea to nominate tutors or mentors as referees. You should choose references that you’re confident will give positive remarks and you should also ensure they would be easily contactable by potential employers when the time comes.

Check for spelling mistakes and typographical errors. Any errors are your responsibility and are one of the first things employers use to weed out the weaker candidates. Even if the role you’re applying for doesn’t require a high level of literacy, spelling errors scream lack of care, which is an undesirable quality for any potential employer. Don’t put all your faith into a spellchecker as many of these are set to American settings as default. If you’re at all unsure about a word look it up in a dictionary. Before you distribute your finished document or upload it onto the internet, get someone else to look over it for you.