Please review my C.V.

b3t4

Hi,

I am a student and about to send out my C.V. for potential graduate jobs. I would really appreciate it if ye could take the time out to review my C.V. and give me some feedback.

Thanks,
A.

seamus

Straight off -
Remove your college results. Useless, and only taking up space. Best to put "Expect to Graduate with a 1.1 Honours Degree in June 2005", then maybe mention what your third year modules were. First and Second year really isn't relevant to a job at all.

Graduate recruitment in IT is still competitive. So I'd maybe put the "Computer Skills" section at the top, above education. Make it jump off the page.

Remove the Checkout operator crap from your work experience. That kind of thing is really only relevant if you're stuck for relevant experience to put down. You're not, your experience is good, you'll be way ahead of others in the same field.

Any reason why you have a word doc, but it's in (what is essentially) plaintext?
You may be going for an IT job, but a lot of your applications will be looked over by a recruitment consultant, HR, or a manager (IT managers very often don't know how to do the job they're hiring you for). Increase the font size a bit, increase the amount of whitespace, make the formatting pleasing to the eye and easy to read, but don't go nuts.

The layout of your sections is very good, and it's overall well written though.

b3t4

seamus wrote:

Straight off -
Remove your college results. Useless, and only taking up space. Best to put "Expect to Graduate with a 1.1 Honours Degree in June 2005", then maybe mention what your third year modules were. First and Second year really isn't relevant to a job at all.

Done [edit]oops, I forgot to mention the thrid year modules but I will do in the next version[/edit]

Graduate recruitment in IT is still competitive. So I'd maybe put the "Computer Skills" section at the top, above education. Make it jump off the page.

I'm not sure if I want to do this as my cv will also drive how an interview will pan out. If I put my employment first I feel that it will guide the interviewer to ask me about my work experience first (which I can rant on about for ages and lead the interview onto my computer skills section. However I'm open to changing it.

Remove the Checkout operator crap from your work experience. That kind of thing is really only relevant if you're stuck for relevant experience to put down. You're not, your experience is good, you'll be way ahead of others in the same field.

Done

Any reason why you have a word doc, but it's in (what is essentially) plaintext?

As it was a text document and I just copied it into word for the bullet points. Is there a neat and appealling way to get bullet points in a text document? Use - perhaps? I'd prefer to have it in text format but if I want to jazz it up I may have to go to .doc, suggestions??

Increase the font size a bit

Done

increase the amount of whitespace

I'm unclear on how you propose to increase the whitespace. Between the sections?? This is how I interpreted this advice and somewhat implemented it. If you mean by removing some text I am unsure on how to cut back any further.

make the formatting pleasing to the eye and easy to read

Could you please clarify to me how I could achieve this with my current format. Change the font??

The layout of your sections is very good, and it's overall well written though.

Thanks.

I've uploaded the updated version.
A.

seamus

How bout this?

b3t4

Many thanks

My C.V. now looks very neat and clean.

Here's hoping it gets me on an interview ladder.

Thanks seamus,
A.

RicardoSmith

Most places look for a Word Doc decently formatted. Sending a txt file would confuse them.

HaVoC

I too must send my cv out had a look at some of the templates only problem is I’m a coder and I don’t have any experience out side of college

jobs i have done are like supermarket and building site labourer.
Not all that relevant.

secret_squirrel

Have you done much project work on your course? Treat your course like another job - put down experience and project names etc rather than specific courses.

I assume you're going to add a nice header too? Some along the lines of :

B3T4

Address, Phone, Email

Then its personal choice but I always put a Profile section on the top of my CV's its a just a short paragraph of text to catch their attention to make them read on.

Here's mine if you want to nick it. I also bold the key skills for the dumb HR types that might be reading it.

Profile
A bright, confident, graduate IS professional, with 7 years development experience, with an emphasis on OLAP, MIS and ETL across multiple technologies and platforms.
Current role is Technical Manager (Open Systems) this involves project work, support of existing applications, and managing staff and contractors.

Development experience includes Essbase OLAP, SQL (Sybase, Oracle, MS Access), Unix Shell scripts, Genio ETL, MS VB & VBA, Cool:gen, TPF, ALCS, Assembler, and has covered Unix (Solaris, AIX), Windows (NT, 2K, XP) and Mainframe systems (MVS, TPF, TSO).
[/end profile]

[edit]
Also its a lot more work but what often gets very good results is to tailor your cv to the job you are going for. Emphasize some points and de-emphasize others.

[6,000th Edit]
Also remember you are marketing yourself with your CV so its fine to show your skills and experiences in the 'best light'. Just dont write so much bullsh*t that you get caught out in the interview.

HaVoC

ya i have done 3 projects

vb 6 crapie database thingie
java crapie database thingie
This year Http pipeline to allow differant languages talk to each other ala soap

so should i leave the work experience out of just Mention it briefly?

secret_squirrel

Mention it briefly - interviewers are pigs for spotting holes in your CV 'timeline'

Obscure

Find that Word ****s up the formatting a lot of the time between different version of it! So what you neatly formatted gets split onto differnet pages etc when the emplorer print it. I send out PDF version of my cv, that way you dont need to worry about version formatting problems (most people have Adobe PDF viewer installed). You can convert from DOC format to PDF using OpenOffice which is open source office program. http://www.openoffice.org/

WhiteWashMan

Obscure wrote:

Find that Word ****s up the formatting a lot of the time between different version of it! So what you neatly formatted gets split onto differnet pages etc when the emplorer print it. I send out PDF version of my cv, that way you dont need to worry about version formatting problems (most people have Adobe PDF viewer installed). You can convert from DOC format to PDF using OpenOffice which is open source office program. http://www.openoffice.org/

to be honest, most agencies will use a cv maker anyway, and will just put your cv into it.
it will bring out the details in a format that suits them.
open office is fine, but it sometimes causes problems for people with speical applications that manipulate word documents.

stick to MS office and 99.99% of the time you will be fine. getting a job is not about fighting the power of MS