CV Tips and Advice - 05.12.2011

Here follows a few tips with regards to making your CV as professional and effective as possible.

1. Always ad the start and end dates, preferably in years and months, to all past employment positions.
2. List your relevant work experience from the most recent to the oldest.
3. Always ad a completion date to any qualifications obtained.
4. Always double and even triple check for spelling mistakes.
5. Preferably, do not ad photo's to your CV, unless requested by the employer or agent. If you do ad a photo, please keep this as professional and formal as possible. Please keep photo's to head, shoulder or at the most upper body shots.
6. Never use capital letters only in your CV, use it to highlight a particular heading or word only.
7. Use the same font type in your CV, or if you really want to use another font, keep the use of it consistent throughout the CV.
8. Since GIS is a technical field where the use of software is heavily relied on, remember to add a section in your CV that will list your software experience. Apart from listing this in one "Software Experience" section, also mention this under each job/employment section as it will highlight what software was used for what tasks.
9. Do not include a header page unless it is requested by the employer or agent. The first page of your CV should start with your personal information, but should also display a summary of your qualifications, experience and skills. This first page will therefore double as a one page advertisement of you.
10. If you have more than 2 years experience, do not list all the subjects, plus results obtained for each in the main body of your CV as this makes the CV to long and difficult to read. This information can be added to the CV as a appendix.

We will elaborate on some of these points in future blog entries, but in the mean time, please remember the 30 seconds rule which refers to the amount of time a CV has to catch the eye of a potential employer.

Apart from the tips above, please also review some of our previous blog entries if you have not already read them:
CV Tips Intro - http://latitude-resource.blogspot.com/2011/09/cv-tips-intro.html
Applying for a advertised position - http://latitude-resource.blogspot.com/2011/09/applying-for-advertised-position-dos.html
CV Layout - http://latitude-resource.blogspot.com/2011/09/your-cv-layout-dos-and-donts.html
CV Layout Continued - http://latitude-resource.blogspot.com/2011/09/your-cv-layout-dos-and-donts-continue.html