A single page printed out and read on paper, which shows up problems a screen hides.
The complaint is always the same: there is nothing to put on it. Almost always there is, and what is missing is not experience but the habit of describing experience as work rather than as membership. Three years of education, a summer job, a society role and two substantial pieces of coursework is a page, provided each line says what was done and what came of it.
Keep it to one page. A reader gives a first pass somewhere in the region of half a minute, and a second page for someone at the start of their working life reads as padding rather than as depth.
The verb decides the line
Compare two versions of the same fact. "Treasurer of the climbing society" tells a reader that you held a title. "Managed a budget of two thousand across a year for a society of eighty members, moved the accounts onto a single system and cut the annual kit spend" tells them what you did, at what scale, with what result.
Start every line with a verb of the second kind: managed, built, wrote, ran, negotiated, taught, rebuilt, coordinated. Avoid the vocabulary of being: responsible for, involved in, participated in, exposed to. They describe proximity to work rather than work.
Attach a number wherever one honestly exists. How many people, how much money, how often, over how long, how large the dataset, how many covers on a Saturday night. Numbers are what turn a claim into a description, and a first CV usually has more of them available than its author thinks. Where no number exists, do not invent one; describe the outcome instead.
A draft being cut down, with the lines that started with a noun crossed out.
What counts as experience
Paid work counts regardless of what it was. A retail or hospitality job demonstrates reliability, working under time pressure, handling money and dealing with people who are not at their best, and those are genuine and transferable. Describe the substance rather than apologising for the sector.
Coursework counts when it involved a real method and a real output: a dissertation, a group project with a client, a laboratory investigation, a piece of software, a data analysis. Name the question, the method and the result in two lines. This is often the most relevant thing on the page for a technical role and it is the part most often reduced to a module title.
Society and volunteering roles count, particularly where they involved money, organising other people or a recurring commitment; the reason to take the committee role seriously in the first place is discussed in joining a society without losing a term. Caring responsibilities, running a household budget and part time work carried alongside a full course all belong on the page too, and the record kept during those shifts is exactly what makes them describable, as noted in part time hours without wrecking the term.
Skills sections deserve care. List what you can actually do and at what level, and be prepared to be tested on any of it in the room. A language listed as fluent will be tried out. Software listed without qualification will be assumed to be working knowledge.
Structure, tailoring and the parts to leave out
Order the page by what the reader needs. Name and contact details at the top, then a short section on education with the degree, the institution, the dates and two or three relevant modules or projects, then experience in reverse date order, then skills, then interests if they are specific enough to be interesting.
Tailor it for each application, which does not mean rewriting it. It means reordering, so that the most relevant experience sits highest, and rewording two or three lines to use the vocabulary of the advertisement. An application to a data role should lead with the analysis project and not with the bar work; the reverse is true for a hospitality management scheme.
Leave off the photograph, the date of birth, the full home address, the school grades once a degree is under way, and any objective statement that could have been written by anybody. Leave off anything you would not want to discuss for five minutes, because the interview will find it, which is the pattern described in placement interviews: the questions that come back.
One page, printed to be read on paper before it is sent anywhere.
Before a CV is sent, check each of these:
- One page, and every line starts with a verb describing something done.
- Every claim carries a scale or an outcome, and none of them is invented.
- The order matches the advertisement, with the relevant work highest.
- Someone else has read it, and it has been read once on paper.
The limits of the page
A CV does not get anyone a job. It gets a conversation, and only for applications where the basic requirements are met. Time spent polishing a document past the point of clarity is time not spent on the two things that produce more interviews: applying to more suitable places, and asking people who already do the work what the route in actually looks like.
It is also a poor instrument for explaining anything unusual. A year out, a change of course, a period of illness, a grade that does not match the rest: none of these fits into a bullet list, and attempting to explain them on the page uses space badly and draws attention to them. That is what a covering letter is for, in one calm sentence, and what the interview is for at greater length.
Two practical cautions. Applications are frequently filtered before a human reads them, so use the plain words the advertisement uses rather than clever synonyms, and keep the layout simple enough to survive being converted to text: one column, standard headings, no text inside images. And check the file itself before sending, since a document named after somebody else's company is a common and entirely avoidable way to end an application early.
Finally, keep the page alive. Add to it in the week something happens rather than in the week you need it, and ask for the reference before you need that too, following asking a tutor for a reference.