Improve your CV

Advice on how to improve your CV.

By now you will have a draft CV with all the key elements listed and in a format that is easy to read. Now let’s look at the content within your CV to maximize its impact.  

To do this you need to provide evidence to support your claims, using active verbs and impact statements to showcase your experience.  

 

Adding impact to your CV

Evidence

It is really important to provide evidence to support any claims that you are making. We could all say that we are good communicators and work well in a team, so we need to prove this by providing strong examples from our experience. 

For example, you could say your team-working skills have been strengthened through your part-time job.  Perhaps you have presented something as part of your course, which would be good evidence of your ability to communicate to others.  

Active Verbs

Using active verbs help to bring a confident tone to your CV and make it easy for your reader to see what skills you have to offer.  Active verbs include words like achieved, initiated, created, designed.  

For example, instead of ‘worked with peers on a group project’ consider ‘developed strong working relationship with other group members’   

Impact Statements

To take this one step further, we want to combine our evidence and active verbs with quantifiable outcomes and measures of success to showcase our accomplishments. Impact statements really add value to your CV and help the reader to see the full extent of your skills and experience.   

Developing your example 

Developed strong working relationship with other group members, delegating duties effectively and ensuring our project completed on time, resulting in positive feedback from our academic supervisor and a score of 80%

It won’t always be possible to quantify your experience but where you can use facts and figures it is worth doing so.  The impact that you made does not have to be on a large-scale, but it shows that not only did you use that skill, you were successful at using it.  Here is another example: 

‘In charge of staff rota’ is purely descriptive, adding an impact statement here will be more effective: 

‘Designed and implemented a rota system using Excel, incorporating staff preference and availability which reduced missed shifts by 30% in the first 3 months’ 

Go through all of the content on your CV and consider how you can add impact statements to your bullet points.   

Use our content checklist below to see if you're ready to move on to adapting your CV. You can click on each step and see what progress you're making.

Get feedback on your CV

Make use of CareerSet to get instant feedback on your CV.


This article was published on