How To Write a Professional CV?

In the 15th century, Leonardo Di Vinci introduced the concept of CV writing by listing down his skills and sending them to the Duke the Milan. Building on that same concept, the framework of modern professional CV writing is built on.

The very basic purpose of a CV is to get you to the interview. A well-versed, impactful, and professional-looking CV will increase your chances of getting that interview. CV writing is a profession on its own, with professionals having years of expertise on their backs. Some common components can turn your amateur CV into a professional one.

Research:

Researching is the first step to starting any project including writing your CV. Your research shines through your work and polishes by pushing it to the extra mile. It also cuts down error rate and time as well as focuses your work to be more composed. Research CVs of high-achieving individuals in your related fields and try to extract inspiration from their CVs.

Personal:

Meeting someone for the first, you introduce yourself and start your CV with a few personal details to introduce yourself to the recruiter. It is customary to follow your name with your contact information and your location. This builds a clear image of you in the mind of the recruiter.

Make sure you do not provide any other extra personal details that are not relevant.

Taglines: Taglines are exactly like what hashtags are to a social media post; they label your CV in a that reflects you as a whole. Using multiple taglines will draw attention to prominent features of your experiences, personality, career, achievements, and abilities.

Adding Taglines can be a way to showcase unique talents and what you bring to the table. What set you apart from other candidates applying for that position is the personalization of a standard format being used.

Taglines are meant to be short and precise serving as one-word summaries for you, predecessor to the actual summary.

The Summary: The professional part of the CV starts with a summary that displays your talents in more detail than the taglines did. The summary itself consists of 4 parts that are your experiences, skills, soft skills, and achievements. Experiences should reflect the job requirement; skills should be either equivalent or transferable. Numerical achievements are the most impactful. Soft skills should showcase people skills and how well you work within a company setting.

The rules for writing an impactful summary dictate the importance of the usage of adjectives to properly outline yourself as an individual. Other rules include highlighting important words to grab the recruiter’s attention and staying under 2-lines per sentence to keep the reader’s attention.

Do not write Day-to-Day tasks in the summary as it is the overall summary of your career, not one specific position.

Areas of expertise: Succeeding the summary, similar to taglines, the “Area of expertise” section lists a series of words that describe you. The objective is to stand out amongst other candidates plying for the position, showcasing traits, and qualifications you possess for the said position. Alongside showcasing your education and your skillset, another important aspect is the usage of keywords mentioned in the job posting in your area of expertise to entice the recruiter into giving attention to your CV. The usage of these words also allows your CV to be scanned through the “applicant tracking system” and pass it onto the next round of shortlisting applications.

Job descriptions: In descending order, list all your jobs alongside their job descriptions. Start with the latest (can be current) job, and write the company name, job title, and date of recruitment. List down all Day-to-Day tasks that you performed in detail. The same norm of staying under 2 lines per sentence is practiced here too, to maintain the reader’s attention. Another practice is to start every sentence with an action verb to make describe the task carried out more effectively. List as many of the tasks you carried out including additional work you carried out that was not part of your job description.

Recruiters focus most on your most recent work experience which may be current as well. The reasoning behind it is that you must be the most evolved version of yourself. It should showcase the best version of your talents and your skills including your position within the organization, the overall goal of your role, and the people you interact with. Other things to list include the tools/software you used, the work that you produced, and most importantly the targets and achievements acquired by you.

In order to save space, you can write about your current role in great detail to give recruiters lots of information and show exactly what you have contributed to your employer while keeping the older roles shortened.

The General rule of thumb for writing Job descriptions is to list every task you carried out that is topic relevant should be listed down to show your wide set of skills. You can list as many jobs as you want but commonly people only list their experience going back to 10 years.

Education: Following your professional experiences, you are required to list down your education introducing the college/university where you acquired said degree from, the degree titles, the field of expertise (majors and minors), and the year of graduation or completion.

The common theme of introducing the company of employment or the institute that educated you before actually establishing your role in the company or the perused degree is done to establish the credibility of your work or education. The main denominator is that it allows the recruiter to judge the standard of work or the education received, if it is subpar, or if is it up to the mark.

Additional Sections: Adding sections as per requirement, you can add sections to display your academic achievement or others in your CV including Licenses, Certifications, Publications, Presentations, Awards, Honors, Fellowships, Grants, Volunteer Experiences, and even Scholarships.

This will enhance not only your overall CV but will also increase your credibility as an individual.

Software and other skills: Lastly, you can add software and other skill sets that were not previously mentioned to bring it all together.

Review to revise: Go through all written material to comprehend where corrections are required and understand what information to keep and what to take out. It is very common to discover silly mistakes, irregularities, grammatical errors, and even misspelled words upon proofreading. Without proofreading these errors would go unnoticed and would manage to find their way into the final CV, waiting to be discovered by the recruiters.

Conclusion: Your CV is your professional biography. A well-written CV can land your dream job while a messy CV can land you a sticky situation. Consider your CV as the ticket for your next Job destination, and give it the utmost importance. There are a lot of possible ways to ruin your CV so it would be a very intelligent decision to avail professional services by people with expertise in this field.

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