These days' employers often receive a lot of CVs for each advertised position - jobs advertised in national papers often attract hundreds of applicants. Consequently, your CV has to be just that little bit special to stand out if you want to secure interviews.

Of course a good CV can continue to work in your favour even after it has obtained an interview for you. It can help you at an interview by carefully focusing the interviewer's mind on your good points and on your achievements. Once you have left the interview it can continue to work in your favour, as the interviewer will probably reread it before making a decision, as to who will be invited to the second interview stage or to whom a job offer should be made. A well written CV can help when it comes to salary negotiations. If your CV conveys your full worth you are likely to get a higher salary offer than you might have done with a poorer CV.

In short, skimping on the time you spend on writing a CV will be a false economy that might harm your career, your finances and ultimately your life as a whole.

Sections to include:

SECTION 1: Personal Details

• Full Name
• Address
• Telephone numbers, home, mobile
• Nationality (+ visa status if looking for work out with country of residence)
• Driving Licence (do you have a full driving licence and is it clean?)

SECTION 2: Profile

Useful to summarise your career history and aspirations in a brief paragraph format to highlight to a future employer what you have done to date and what you want to do in the future.

SECTION 3: Key Skills / Major Achievements

If your experience is of a managerial capacity, technical or of a specialist nature, it is often useful to incorporate a section in bullet point format highlighting important selling tools in your career, e.g.

• "Managed £1.5 million project"
• "Trained all new employees in relation to internal quality system"
• "Awarded employee of the year in 2008"
• "Successfully implemented team management system throughout offices in UK, Houston & West Africa"
• "Exceeded sales targets by 150% in three consecutive years"
• "Proficient in the implementation of SAP system"

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