Crafting your CV

Most graduates from good universities will have spent a good proportion of their spare time in their final year looking for a good graduate level job. Competition for places on the best blue chip schemes is intense, and it requires a great deal of work and effort to secure one. For some people, they will always have had a particular career ambition in mind, and no doubt will have made preparations for such a career from the time they arrived at University. For others, however, their choice of career is a less uncertain variable, and will obviously require quite a bit of thought.

Graduate recruitment departments are usually well aware of these two categories of candidate for places on their graduate schemes, and are all too clued up as to the fact that the second category of people may not know that much about their potential career. Because competition for places on a blue chip scheme is intense, it does not take much for the recruiter to reject applications that are obviously badly researched, are of poor quality and hastily put together.

This is why those who are less clear about what they want to do after University should really start thinking as soon as they can about their future applications, and in particular getting a CV together. This in its most basic form lists all your achievements, interests and past work experience, if any. From this foundation, you can build up to a more refined document, which includes what skills you have, how these apply to the workplace, and how they are relevant to the job you are applying for. Furthermore, it is important to remember that a CV is a 'live' document, which means that you can alter it as and when you feel appropriate: it can never be fully polished.

When your CV has been put together, even if it be in a rough draft format, it can be used to cut and paste into application forms: the majority of job application forms these days are submitted online. So as a resource to draw on, it will include all sorts of information that you might not necessarily include in a standard two page CV, but because different recruitment departments ask different questions of the candidate, you can build up a bank of such things – these can then be used on different applications as and when required, without writing them out again.

At the end of the day, it is up to the you, the candidate, to work on a CV– while there is a great deal of advice and support out there, the place on a good graduate scheme will ultimately have been earned by the candidate's own efforts. Reed’s website helps you seek out suitable jobs to kick-start a blue chip career and you could try CV Wizard for some CV building help.