Your CV – or Curriculum Vitae to give it its proper Latin name – can be the most important document you will ever present to a prospective employer. It is a passport of your working life and tells future employees just how competent you are and gives your employer a fair idea about you – your abilities, your strengths and your skill set. This would help them judge how helpful you can be for their organisation.
Hence, in this case, your resume is the window of your working life. For that reason if the employer likes your resume, they will call you for an interview and you will get a second chance to prove yourself.
So time and effort and thought needs to be put into preparing your CV or resume to make sure it attracts the right employer who picks up your working biography and leaves the other candidates to gather dust.
So before you start make sure you read the job description properly studying the background to the company, the job responsibilities and what qualifications, if any, are required for the position.
If you are applying in reference to an employment notice or advert in newspaper, magazine or online job board, go through the entire text thoroughly. Read the ‘about us’, job responsibilities and requirements line by line. Once finished, read it for another time. A lot of people do the mistake of scanning online employment notices lightly and often miss the important points.
Having inspected the requirements carefully, start preparing your resume. Highlight the facts about you that are helpful for the employer. For example, if you are applying for jobs in advertising and the advertising agency is looking for a creative person, why don’t you start your resume describing the advertising project that you did in college and how successful it was!
Resume Formats: - Chronological, Functional, Combination
The three resume formats are – chronological, functional and combination.
In a chronological resume you list your work experience in reverse chronological order, i.e., the latest work experience is mentioned first and so on. After work experience, educational background is listed in the same way.
Chronological resume expresses your career growth. On the other hand, a functional resume highlights your abilities and skills under the title of various functions you have performed in different organisations. Functional resume is useful when you decide to switch your career – this format helps your employer understand how swift you are at adopting new job profiles.
Combination resume is a hybrid of both of the above mentioned formats. Here employment history is listed chronologically and then the skills and abilities are presented adhering to functional resume writing properties. Combination resume can be useful for those who are changing career and have worked on various industries in past.
Choose the right format for your resume and hit the job market. A well-written resume is the key to successful career.
“If you are not big enough to lose, you are not big enough to win.”
Walter Reuther
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