THE National Careers Service has the following advice on how best to structure your C.V.
HINTS AND TIPS:
YOUR PERSONAL DETAILS
Include your name, address and contact details. You don’t need to include your age, marital status or nationality. Make sure your email address sounds professional.
YOUR PERSONAL PROFILE
This is a mini-advert for you and should summarise your:
• skills and qualities
• work background and achievements
• career aims
It should only be a few lines and needs to grab the reader’s attention. When describing your career aims, think about the employer you’re sending the CV to. Make your careers aims sound just like the kind of opportunities they currently have.
EMPLOYMENT HISTORY AND WORK EXPERIENCE
You’ll usually put your employment history first if you’ve been working for a few years.
If you don’t have much work experience, focus on your your education and training.
Start with the job you’re doing now, or the last job you had, and work backwards. You need to include your employer’s name, the dates you worked for them, your job title and your main tasks. Also include any relevant temporary work and volunteering experience.
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Start with your most recent qualifications and work back to the ones you got at school.
Use bullet points or a table and include:
• the university, college or school you went to
• the dates the qualifications were awarded and any grades
• any work-related courses
INTERESTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Include hobbies, interests and achievements that are relevant to the job
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
You can include this section if you need to add anything else that’s relevant.
You may need to explain a gap in your employment history, like travelling or family reasons. You could also include other relevant skills here, such as if you have a driving licence or can speak any foreign languages.
REFERENCES
You can list your referees on your CV or just put ‘references available on request’. At least one referee should be work-related or, if you haven’t worked for a while, you could use another responsible person who has known you for some time.