Curriculum vitae (CV) is very important these days either for scholarships, conferences, fellowships, or jobs. A curriculum vitae is simply a summary of one’s career skills both academic and professional.
Apart from style, structure and number of pages, there are certain things that must be included in a curriculum vitae to make it be of good quality. Some of these are highlighted below:
- A standard CV should have a title. This helps to define its purpose. It could be for the purpose of scholarships, jobs etc. This has to be clearly stated.
- A CV should include bibliographical or personal information. These include names as written on official documents, country, nationality, postal address, email address, telephone numbers, gender etc.
- Academic background. These include all schools attended usually starting with the most recent. In listing the schools attended, years of enrollment and completion have to be stated, levels and types of qualification awarded.
- Professional background for CVs ranges from voluntary and civil society activities, internships, jobs and student union activities. It has to be listed in order of preference based on the specific type and purpose of application and starting with the most recent.
- Organisational and communication skills have to be stated as well. These are skills gained through professional career development such as public speaking, working in groups, leadership potentials etc.
- A CV should equally carry all the languages one can speak and write stating with it their levels of proficiency.
- Another item a CV should have is IT skills given the innovation in science and technology and the fact that IT skills are needed in every type of occupation nowadays.
- Though not a standard requirement for a good CV, it is important to always include your choices of extra curricula activities.
- Recommendations are also good to be included in a CV.
Besides what a CV should or should not have, the structure, style and number of pages in a CV are also measurement tools for its quality.
Structure simply refers to format and what comes first in the CV. Generally, most CVs are structured in the order which the points above have been listed. Style deals with the decision to detail or not to detail certain aspects of the CV such as educational background or professional experience. Given that a good CV should not exceed a certain number of pages-in most cases three-it is important to always be brief and captivating in structure and style when writing a CV.
There are so many formats a CV can take but every one of these depends on where, who and for what purpose you are writing the CV. One of the common formats is FREESUMES,
Contact Team NPGS to help you with your CV!
