This is a big challenge for a lot of young people especially when you're applying for jobs and a lot of the adverts are saying that you need experience and you need certain skills. How do you actually go about showing people you have these skills when you have no work experience? It is challenging but it's not impossible. You just need to be a bit creative in where you pull the skills out from and then how you show them to people. So throughout this guide what I'm going to cover is what is a CV first of all. What is a CV and what is its purpose more importantly and then who reads your CV? It's important that you understand who's reading your CV when you apply for jobs so that you can tailor it to their needs.
CV form and structure: Before you start putting any content into the CV it's important that it looks good and it's also easy for people to read and that's all down to form and structure a CV profile which is the introductory paragraph at the top we're going to look at how you can write one of those to help attract people and grab people's attention. When you first open up the CV,and then core skills and achievements,your education section and your hobbies and interests and how you can pull skills out of those areas that are going to be relevant to the job you're applying for.
So what is a CV? Essentially,a CV is a document that you write that contains a lot of work-related information about yourself and you use it whenever you apply for a job,the best way to think about it is if it's like you're marketing material for your services as an employee so like a leaflet or a brochure for your services so it needs to sell you,it needs to tell people you've got the right skills and knowledge to do the jobs that they're looking for and it needs to win you interviews. That's its ultimate aim we read your CV,so once you've written your CV and you start sending it off to apply for jobs who are the people that actually read the CV and decide whether or not you get an interview.
There are two types of people who read your CV. The first type of people are hiring managers. These are the people that work within the organizations that you're applying to who actually need to start within their team or area so for example if you apply for a sales assistant job within a shop it might be the shop manager so it's the person that you ultimately end up working for and then you also have recruiters. Recruiters are kid of middlemen within the employment game. They are hired specifically to find candidates to send through to hiring managers. So they kind of screen you, have a quick chat with you and then they'll pop your CV through to the hiring manager if they think you're a good fit. Those are the two people you need to be concerned about when you're writing your CV.
The most important things to know about them are
1. They're very busy people and
2. They see lots and lots of CV. A recruiter for example might see a hundred CVS every day so it's important to know that because you need to adapt your CV to make it easy for them to read and so that it stands out among all the other candidates who are also applying for the same jobs as you,how to format and structure your CV. Before you start adding any content to the CV,what you need to do is make sure it looks nice and professional and easy to read such that recruiters and hiring managers can quickly whisper it and then pick out the information they want.
So the first thing you need to do is write it in a very simple font something like Arial or Tahoma. If you're using Microsoft Word don't try to use a fancy font because often they'll be difficult to read. So you just want to make sure it's nice and clear then stick to a simple color scheme. Black text on white backgrounds tends to work best you can add a little bit of color if you want but don't go crazy and make the CV look unprofessional and a bit garish no photos or images so a photo of yourself or any kind of imagery or logos are just not necessary for a CV all you need to do is convince people that you have the right skills and knowledge for their jobs so there's no need for any photos or images.
Clearly divide your sections for the CV so every section should be nice,bold heading and perhaps a border as well so that people can easily navigate the page and they know where they're looking at. Break the text up so as to make it easy to read and ensure that people can digest the information on the page you need to make sure the text is nicely broken up with short paragraphs and lots of bullet points and lastly to keep it to one page now this shouldn't be difficult if you have no experience but the reason behind this is really because you know busy recruiters and hiring managers don't have time to read. Three,four or five page long CVS. Keep it nice and concise so they can read it quickly.
Once you've got a nice professional-looking and easy to read format for the CV you then need to structure it in a way that is logical for readers so that they're getting the right information in the right order. So start off with your name and contact details at the very top of the CV the reason they're at the top is because you don't want recruiters to miss your contact details. There's no point having a really good CV and hiding your telephone number down the bottom, so make them nice and clear at the top just include your location,your telephone number and your email address because that's all you need you don't need to include things like date of birth and full address because they're not needed at this stage of the application and they'll just waste space, then add a personal profile. So this is an introductory paragraph that just summarizes your offerings. It tells people a little bit about your skills and background and what you can bring to the role. This idea is to attract people,hook their attention and get them to dedicate some more time to reading the rest of your CV.
Then add core skills and achievements section so this is just a bullet pointed section. They'll highlight some of your really important skills for the job you're applying for and some things you've achieved both in and out of school they're going to look impressive and get people's attention. Then you want to list your education detailing the schools you've been to,the grades you've got whether it's GCSE A-levels or whatever it might be and then if you don't have much experience what's really good is to add good hobbies and interests section because there are lots of things probably within your hobbies that you can draw out lots of skills,lots of achievements or some knowledge that are actually going to be relevant and you can transfer them into into the workplace in the future.
So let's continue by looking at the first proper content of the CV which is the professional profile. The profile is an introductory paragraph that sits at the very top of the CV and its aim is to hook recruiter's attention when they first open up the CV. Tell them a bit about you and ensure they stick around to read the rest of the CV. What you want to do here is just give a nice overview of you,know why you're suitable for the roles they're looking for in a nice quick few lines so they then read the rest of the CV . The type of content you need to include within the profile are things like your education. Your education is obviously very important as somebody who has no experience because that's where the bulk of your skills and knowledge are going to come from so you need to talk about you,know the level of education you've had so whether it's college or school the type of exams you've done,the kind of results you've got,the ,kind of subjects you've studied in to give people a nice idea of your educational background.
You also need to talk about your objective so for example lets say a person is trying to get into the finance industry so they talk a bit about you,know why they want against that industry and more importantly why they think they'd be good at it relevant skills so obviously. That's another thing that's very important so this person is talking about their mathematics skills you know they're and their numeracy and things like that because they're going to be important to finance roles,so you need to find out what skills are important to the roles you're applying for and then try and get some of those skills into the profile. Your soft skills are things that are less tangible, things like communication,teamwork ,not specific to a particular role but they're still important in the workplace.
You need to talk about those you know . You can get those from things you've done in school,things you've done outside of school,hobbies etc . If you play sports that you know that would mean that you've got a good teamwork background achievements so anything you've achieved particularly in school. Whether it's high grades within a particular subjects or it's being part of a club,anything especially if it's relevant to the role you're applying for. Try and get those kind of things in there.
Once you've written your CV profile you need to add a core skills and achievement section. So what this section is,is a very simple bullet-pointed list of skills that are relevant to the roles you're applying for but also just some sort of impressive achievements . Again this is a very simple section but the effect it has is because there's such short sharp points. It's very very hard for someone to miss those points when they open up the CV so make sure that the most important things get noticed by the recruiters who are reading your CV.
For example a person is applying for finance roles so he knows he's going to the fact that he could amass but he has also got some sort of generally impressive things and there as well. So his GCSE grades,the fact there are volunteer,the fab a pond,the science award before at school and those are just going to help people notice those achievements and those skills.
Then we come to your education section. Obviously the idea here is to give employers a good idea of your education. So what you've done in school and what you've achieved . What you need to include here are the schools or colleges you've attended and the dates and the subjects you studied, the grades you achieved . Like if you did GCSEs or A-levels you,get them in there and and talk about the grades you achieved and also you know you can also add details around modules and projects.
So if you're for example applying to science-based roles and you did some really in-depth science work,you can talk about that a bit more to show a bit more of your knowledge and expertise in that area. You don't need to do that but it's just nice to do a few if you've got a specific area you're going for and you've got more detail you can talk about and also your extra-curricular activities.
Employers love to see people who are proactive,who go out there and do things and achieving. So if you've been member of a sports team or if you've led an after-school Club or been a prefect or something like, that shows employers that you're willing to go the extra mile and makes you look like a better chance of being a good candidate.
The last section you need to include in your CV is your hobbies and interests . Hobbies and interests give you a good opportunity to talk about some of the skills and knowledge that you've picked up outside of school. If you play for a team or you play an individual sport that's a great way of showing how motivated and dedicated you can be and also there's a whole host of skills that come within that as well so things like teamwork communication and that kind of thing then you've got other clubs as well. Perhaps you might be a Scouts or you take part in a Chess Club shows how dedicated you are.
Again there are lots of skills that you can talk about that relate to you. Things in the work place. Then you've got volunteering, if you perhaps volunteer for a charity or something like that it shows you a good character and you're motivated you go out there and do things but also there's a lot of skills again that come with volunteering .So dealing with the public perhaps dealing with transactions,again all things that can be closely related to various jobs.
And then you've got work related hobbies.This could be something like if you are applying for IT roles and you like to make websites in your spare time and obviously that's a great way to show you have lots of relevant skills.
So just think about your hobbies and interests of things you do outside of school and how you can tie them into the jobs you're applying for. If you're thinking about writing your CV and you're just thinking to yourself well I just don't really have enough to go in there,that's very common for inexperienced people so there are a couple of things you can do to improve your CV.
Before you've even got started,the first thing is to get some volunteer work. Obviously nobody likes to work for free but if you can approach some local businesses or charities or even your old schools or college and just offer your services free most people will jump at the chance to get the extra help. You'll get lots of experience and you'll be able to add it to your CV to show some more skills that you have. The second thing you can do is do a vocational course. If you're applying for finance roles for example you could take an accounting course and even you don't have to have completed it,when you've started it you can put that on your CV straight away and say look I'm studying for this and it shows that you're more dedicated to that role and it shows you've got more of the skills that they need so those are the two things you can do to improve your CV straightaway.
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