Have you thought about what you’re going to do after uni­ver­si­ty? How you’re going to find the right job?

A bit scary, isn’t it?

Luck­i­ly, a recent B&E lec­ture gave us at least some of the answers and might help us put some of those stress­ful thoughts to bed.

Here’s what we cov­ered in the lec­ture…

First­ly, we heard that a good cur­ricu­lum vitae (CV) are at the fore­front of any job appli­ca­tion. It’s the pri­ma­ry tool employ­ers use to eval­u­ate your suit­abil­i­ty for a role.

So it’s vital that you get the design, con­tent, and cov­er­ing let­ter of a CV right in order to stand out from the crowd and be the one they select.

Stick to Standard Formats for Your CV

Although there is no com­plete­ly stan­dard design for­mat for a CV, it needs to feel famil­iar to the read­er so they don’t get lost or con­fused.

Feel free to apply a lit­tle cre­ativ­i­ty to make your CV eye-catch­ing and dif­fer­ent, but you must make sure that it’s eas­i­ly read­able. And make sure you get your spelling and gram­mar right too!

Make Your CV Content Concise and Focused

In a CV you only have 2 pages to get all the key aspects of your suit­abil­i­ty for a job over to a poten­tial employ­er.

That’s not a lot of space!

So be con­cise and rel­e­vant. No need to include when you learned how to ride your bike or con­quered your child­hood fear of spi­ders. Unless it’s rel­e­vant to the job you’re apply­ing for, you’re sim­ply wast­ing space.

Keep your CV straight to the point and high­light your job skills. It’s also vital that you include your mod­ule marks from your course, espe­cial­ly if you are apply­ing for an aca­d­e­m­ic post.

Target Your Perfect Job With a Great Covering Letter

In my opin­ion, this was the most impor­tant aspect of the lec­ture and a defin­ing part of any job appli­ca­tion.

A cov­er let­ter is an addi­tion­al cov­er sheet used to tai­lor your appli­ca­tion to your dream job.

It allows you to show off your knowl­edge of their com­pa­ny and any extra read­ing you have done on them to put your appli­ca­tion in a pos­i­tive light before they have even read your CV.

Recent research has shown that recruiters often look at a CV for just a few sec­onds before decid­ing whether to put a can­di­date for­ward for a job. Your cov­er­ing let­ter is your chance to make sure your CV gets read more thor­ough­ly and gets put for­ward.

So make sure you do your research for your pre­ferred employ­ers. It can make all the dif­fer­ence

Your Next Step

The infor­ma­tion in the lec­ture cer­tain­ly helped to reduce my stress lev­els and will allow me to be more con­fi­dent when apply­ing for job posts with a tai­lored and emphat­ic new look on my CVs.

I have also found out the need for mod­ule marks which, as seen here, has already added to my CV con­tent. From this it has made my CV writ­ing more con­sice as the lev­el of space I have left has dras­ti­cal­ly reduced.

It also made me recon­sid­er read­able text fonts and for­mat­ting issues that may have once plagued my mind when writ­ing to employ­ers. Some­times Times New Roman is the best font to use as it does­nt dis­tract the read­er from the con­tent.

And hope­ful­ly, this arti­cle has helped you to de-stress a lit­tle about CVs too!

For more use­ful infor­ma­tion the Prospec­tus web­site is full of tips and ideas about CVs and cov­er­ing let­ters.

But don’t for­get that your CV is sim­ply the tick­et to the next step of the process. You still need to get through the dread­ed inter­view!

You can read more here about inter­view skills from the next B&E lec­ture.