CV writing toolkit

This section should include your name, address/location, email address and phone number. You could also include a link to your LinkedIn profile here too. You don’t need to include any other personal details such as nationality, date of birth or marital status in this section, and it is not a requirement to include a photograph of yourself either.

A short 3-4 lines to grab the reader’s attention. A good structure to follow is to say who you are, what you can offer the employer in terms of skills and experience, and what your objective is with that particular version of your CV.

List your qualifications in reverse chronological order (so most recent first). Most of this content in this section should come under your degree - at this stage your secondary and further education qualifications should take up no more than a line each.

List your work experience in reverse chronological order, and detail in bullet points your key tasks, achievements and skills acquired throughout. If you have work experience that you consider to be particularly relevant to the job you are applying to, you could split your work experience into ‘relevant’ and ‘other’, which means you get around the chronological requirements

Add information about your hobbies and interests to your CV if you can fit it on - employers like to see this kind of information. This could include any university societies and/or sports teams you have joined.

This section is not always necessary, but you could look to include information that doesn’t ‘fit’ elsewhere on the CV, such as about your driving licence, languages, first aid/DBS certificates etc.

It is not necessary to provide details of your references actually on the CV itself, a statement to the effect of ‘References Available On Request’ should be sufficient.

When it comes to layout, simple is often best - you don’t want to make your CV difficult to read, or sacrifice content in order to use an elaborate template. Laying out your CV in columns can sometimes make the information tricky to follow; instead think about having one section under the other, and using bolder headings and possibly subheadings to clearly mark out your sections.

An easily readable font is also important - fonts like Arial, Calibri or Verdana in size 11-12 work well. This will ensure your CV is simple for both ATS software and human recruiters to decipher. Avoid using tables, graphs and images as these can be difficult to manipulate and take up valuable space.

In most cases, your CV should be no more than two pages of A4 in length (the exception to this is a CV for academic purposes, which can be longer). It is important that your first page is your ‘power page’, and has all your most relevant and recent information, such as your degree studies, and any relevant work experience.

You might find that a one page CV is more appropriate for a part time job, or employers might specifically request a one page CV for some graduate level roles. You can always change the length to suit the purpose of your CV.

It is important not to have ‘white space’ on your CV if possible, so try to stick to either one or two full pages. If you are really struggling to fit your content onto two pages, changing the margins to ‘narrow’ on your document can help with this.

Bullet points are a great way to structure the information under your CV headings. They help to break your content down into short phrases and make it easier for the recruiter to read and identify your skills - rather than them being confronted with a large paragraph of text that they have to decipher.

When it comes to formulating your bullet points, it’s a good idea to avoid personal pronouns (I, me, my) and try to start each one with an Action Word (see below).