What Is the Best CV Format for Recent Graduates? скачать в хорошем качестве

What Is the Best CV Format for Recent Graduates?

So recent graduates are often given what we would describe as quite diffused advice in terms of writing their CVs. What we see is very brief documents with hardly any information, pretty much not going much further than explaining exactly where they went to university and the fact that they had a part-time job in a supermarket or whatever else it might be. They're up against people who also have a degree in the same subject area as they do, who've also done some part-time work. So, if you're an employer, how do you differentiate between one graduate and another graduate when you're faced with hundreds of CVs which pretty much say the same thing? i.e. I went to university, I studied, I got this qualification, and I worked on the checkouts in ASDA or whatever else it might be. Everybody just says the same thing. So, what I suggest is that you go a stage further and move aside all this advice that your CV needs to be really brief. You know, brief means little information. I'm not sure how anybody thinks that's going to help. But if you've got a CV that's half a page long, how can you present a case to a future employer that they should hire you based on half a page of information? The only way you're going to persuade somebody to be interested in you is to provide a compelling business case that you can do the things that they might want you to do in the role. So, it's all a question of focusing on transferable skills. If you ask any graduate what their key skills are, they'll go, "Oh yeah, well, attention to detail, working well in a team, you know, I can speak to people at all levels and I've got really good leadership skills," and I never know where that last one comes in because as a graduate, you're unlikely to be in a leadership position anyway. But if you look at graduate CVs, there always seems to be some focus on leadership skills. But once again, these skills are very generic and everybody just focuses on the same things. I bet you if you looked at 100 graduate CVs, those four things I've just said would be on pretty much all of them. But what about more interesting skills that employers are really interested in? Like project management, like business acumen, like understanding numbers. What about relationship building and client-facing skills? Graduates really need to think through the skills that future employers are looking for and move beyond this clichéd, same-as-everybody-else kind of approach and focus on skills that are a little bit more thought out. And then once you've identified the skills that they might need that you have, then you need to find some examples from something you've done in your life. So that could be in work, it could be in education, it could be something extracurricular that you've done, part of a hobby or an interest or whatever else. For example, project management is a very prized skill that if you had as a graduate, it's a very, very transferable skill that future employers would prize. So what have you done that falls into that category? Have you, for example, led a Duke of Edinburgh expedition across some moorland somewhere and camped out for three days in the freezing cold, leading a team of people across hundreds of miles worth of moorland? Have you organized a battle of the bands competition in your local village hall that raised £10,000 for charity? Have you done any charitable work? Have you led a particularly successful project during your education that had some commercial value to it? So, for example, when I was at university, we were, as part of our marketing module, engaged by a local town council to do a project on how they could attract more trade and industry to the town. Now, our presentation, our report that we did, probably wasn't all that good if I'm honest. We had different people pulling in different directions, if I remember rightly. But had we done a particularly good job and presented the town council with some useful recommendations to attract trade and industry to the town and that had been implemented and had some positive outcomes for that town, what a great case study to put on a CV as a fresh graduate. The idea is that you're going to try and find examples of things that you've done in your life that prove you have these skills and then you present those on your CV as little mini-case studies using the STAR methodology. STAR is a little acronym for situation, task, actions, and result. And if you can write a little mini case study, no longer than six lines long, about these really good things that you've done that prove you have the transferable skills that your future employers are looking for and you add that to the rest of the things that you would normally have on a graduate CV, i.e. your education, any work experience that you've got, then all of a sudden, you have a much more powerful document than everybody else which, if you do it right, is going to practically guarantee you interviews for graduate positions.