Lesson 6 – A winning CV

A CV stands to “curriculum vitae”, the course of your life. A winning CV that can land you the interview requires a lot of specific tailored work.

If you completed and finetuned your All About Me and STARs and reflected on your personal brand, you already have the content for your CV.

Let’s discuss creating a winning CV in detail.

Note it is recommended not to use boarders formatting in your CV as it confuses the scanning algorithms.

There is a lot of advice on the internet about the action word you should or shouldn’t use in your CV. Note also the words to avoid, which include detail oriented, unless specifically required). These are a few resources, but others are available:

The attached is a template of a generic CV. It is generic in the sense that it tailored to the type of job roles you want to apply for, but requires specific tailoring and editing for each individual job application.

If you want to apply to different types of job roles you need different generic CVs!

You could create a generic CV for yourself and tailor it to each specific job applications.

If you have changed careers a lot and have many gaps, it is advisable to use skills based CV. The above template works quite well for a skills based CV and you simply could increase the number of achievements for each of your key skills and reduce the amount of information in your career history simply mentioning the job roles and employer names and responsibilities that are relevant and reinforce your skills.

Get some advice from fellow mentees. They may have access to some additional resources and provide some advice and a sounding board.

Forum CV advice thread: