Built on a Foundation of Ethics and Experience

CV Guidance

General Advice

• Priority - Assess the unique qualities that you want to promote
• Skills - Focus on skills you have developed during your previous experiences rather than simply listing the tasks that you completed.
• Ability - Emphasise achievements, not duties.
• Vanity - Beware of using a personal profile that describes the writer as a paragon of executive virtue. If you feel that you need to use one, perhaps to bring together skills and information that is scattered over a variety of jobs, make sure that the factual content is high, that the achievements are quantifiable and that it is free from hype.
• Economy - Heighten impact and aid brevity by making every single word work for its keep, leaving out anything that does not help the CV to achieve its objectives. children's names should never be mentioned.
• Honesty - Never lie or make unjustifiable claims.

Style

• Brevity - Keep the CV as succinct as possible.
• Clarity - Avoid all jargon and abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the reader.

Layout

• Typography - Use a single, business-like typeface such as Times New Roman. Multiple typefaces look messy. To add emphasis and variety, use capitalisation, emboldening and, discerningly, vary the size of type.
• Accuracy - Use your spellchecker, but proof-read carefully too. A single error can spoil the impact of the whole CV.
• Chronology - Start with your most recent experiences/qualifications first. i.e Reverse chronological.
• Template - We have prepared a simple template which we can help you to expand when we speak to you.