Reflections On My CV

Reflections On My CV

Until around three weeks ago, I had never started working on my CV, so it was a bit of a shock last week when I was told I had to combine 17 years of my life achievements and work experience into two pieces of paper. It did not quite work out. Initially, I thought a CV was as long as you wanted it to be, so my original copy was four pages long! Dan said it was one of the longest he’d ever seen, which did make me chuckle.

So, for my research and how I would write my CV, I first downloaded a template from an uncopyrighted source online and modified the section titles to match a job in the media. After this I researched how to write a personal statement, I found that apart from writing down some fancy words there needs to be useful skills in there too, so for mine, I have written, that I have a robust and organised work ethic, how I got into media, what sort of things I am looking for in a job and what I am currently up to (studying at Weston College).

Writing the personal statement went pretty well, although it was revised around several areas, because either things didn’t make sense or certain things were repeated in my key skills, I finally got it, and I can say it does sell me!

Next was the key skills, for this section I only wanted to put down the most useful skills I possess and the ones I am most proud of, like my ability to understand multiple operating systems, my self-taught I.T. skills and the fact I can operate all sorts of camera equipment, including a drone! This section was quite fun to write about, as It made me appreciate what I have learnt over the past year from my college course and what I have taught myself. This section was written in bullet points as I believe it is the most effective way to get quick fore points across.

Next was my education. This section was relatively easy to write, I jotted down where I studied, how long I was there and the location. For my GCSE’s, I condensed them into bullet points, making sure I put the grade I achieved after a dash. Other than this, after a few revisions I changed the text size of the location and the places down from size 12 to 10.

Next was work experience that I had previously had from the above education, but after some feedback, I swapped the sections around, and this works better as now work experience is all on one page. After this, I have a big size 12 title in bold for the title of my role, the company name, and then the location of the company. Below I decided to put the dates of the months and year I worked for each business, which just gives the reader an idea as to where I am currently working and where I have worked in the past, its also organised now so that the places where I am currently working are at the top of the page and the places where I have worked in the past are down the bottom of the page, so it’s all in chronological order.

For each section I also made sure to bullet point all of the key activities I worked on at each business, making sure to get as much information down, whilst maintaining condensed sentences, now this is where I struggled in the past, where I originally had 4 pages, that same information is now on two pages, and it is better and complete information now, as I have revised each sentence multiple times.

Below Work Experience, I have my current employment. In this section, I listed that I am currently working at Burnett & Hillman as a stores worker and have been ever since 2016.

Finally, I have a reference section, where I left a sentence saying, ‘References available on request’, letting the employer know if they want any more information about my work experience or anything else in my CV, then they can email me.

I have leant so much from this short, two-page document, I needed to cram in such a large amount of detail into a tiny amount of writing. The number of revisions I have made too is crazy! In total it took me nine attempts to get it all right!

Overall, a vital document completed, that I will have to keep updated for the future, but I am pleased this is now created.