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How to Improve Your CV

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One of the main reasons that our students take courses with us is so they have more credentials to add to their curriculum vitae, often shortened to CV. But in order to really stand out, it’s going to take a bit more than just qualifications to impress recruiters. So here are a couple of ways on how you can improve your CV.

 

Keep your CV short

Read through your CV and ensure that you aren’t using any wordy sentences. This means keeping all of your sentences short, concise and to the point. Remove excess words that aren’t needed and keep your entire CV on a maximum of two pages. Any more and it’s going to be far too much to read. Ideally, you want to keep your CV to just a single page so your recruiter doesn’t need to read through too much to get an idea of the type of person you are.

Try to avoid imparting too much personality into your CV as this is the main source of wordy sentences that can often drift off and confuse the reader.

 

Talk about things that are relevant to the job

You might have a really long list of qualifications that you received from our distance learning courses, but you should keep in mind that employers probably won’t care about unrelated subjects that have nothing to do with the job. For example, if you’re being considered for a job at a tech company, then your courses in beauty and nails won’t be of much use.

It’s not too much effort to change the qualifications on your resume to fit the needs of the company that you’re applying to. For example, if you’re trying to join a web design company, then social media and information technology courses could be helpful because they are related. Just don’t list all of your qualifications even if you’re proud of them. Instead, pick specific ones that are relevant.

 

Life experience can be helpful

If you find yourself with only a few qualifications that are relevant to the job, then make sure you add a couple of relevant life experiences. For example, if you’re applying to work as an accountant then you could talk about situations where you had to use your skills such as filling in part-time for an accountant at your previous job or budgeting for other projects that you were involved in.

Hobbies can also be added to a life experiences section especially if they’re relevant. However, don’t list too many things in your life experience section and keep them related to the job you’re applying to.

 

Be professional

Lastly, it’s vital that you try to be as professional as possible. Trying too hard, such as including a photograph or other documents when not explicitly requested, can make you seem a little too enthusiastic. In addition, you should change your email address if possible to look more professional, such as adding your real name instead of a nickname.

Make sure the CV itself is formatted so that it’s clean and consistent, meaning don’t mix up too many fonts and make sure the language you use is suitable for a professional environment.

 

We hope this helps for when the time comes to prepare or update your CV.