What Are The 5 Parts Of A CV?

Anyone who has written a CV has probably had to overcome a number of challenges – whether they are lack of work experience, gaps in employment, or explaining a short stint that didn’t work out.

Facing these issues when writing your CV does not mean you’re not a worthy employee, it just means that you must find ways to explain areas that may appear negative to recruiters. If you’re struggling to explain discrepancies on your CV, in this article I have highlighted five parts of a cv to tailor.

The five most important parts of a CV are your contact information, career profile, experience, skills, and education. This standard outline is appropriate for nearly any job seeker.

However, there are also many optional pieces of information you can add to your CV, depending on your unique experience and the requirements of the job you’re applying to.

1. Contact Information

The purpose of your contact information is to help the hiring company quickly know who you are and how they can reach you.

Your contact information should be listed in your CV header, and include these five pieces of information:

•         First and last name
•         Email
•         Phone number
•         Mailing address
•         LinkedIn (optional)
•         Current job title (optional)

2.  Career profile

Your career profile is a quick three-to-four sentence summarization in your CV that details your experience, relevant skills, and other key qualifications.

You can best think of your career profile as an elevator pitch. It’s the first CV section the hiring company will see and should grab their attention immediately.

Career objectives are written to target a specific position and show how you would use your skills, experience, and training to help the company achieve their goals. Essentially, it should serve as the highlight reel of your career for the hiring committee to quickly review and ensure that your qualifications match the job requirements.

For example, an IT expert’s career profile could look like this;

I am a highly competent IT professional with a proven track record in designing websites, networking, and managing databases. I have strong technical skills as well as excellent interpersonal skills, enabling me to interact with a wide range of clients. I am eager to be challenged in order to grow and further improve my IT skills. My greatest passion in life is using my technical know-how to benefit other people and organizations.

3. Work experience.

Make sure to put your most recent job first. In this section, include your full job title, your start date, and finish date, and a brief summary of your responsibilities and achievements. The best way to format this section is to use bullet points. Also, begin by using an action verb, and use hard numbers when detailing your accomplishments. Action verbs i.e consult, coordinate, etc help make your experience sound more impressive and interesting to read to hiring managers.

4. Education and qualifications

List your education and qualifications in reverse chronological order, this means putting your most recent first. Include the course or qualification name, the school or university you attended, and your grades.

5. Skills

The skills section of your CV sums up your expertise and skillsets in a short, easy-to-read list. Regardless of how much experience you have, you should always include a skills section on your CV.

To write a strong skills section, list your most marketable abilities and include a mix of both hard skills and soft skills to show employers that you’re a dynamic, well-rounded candidate.

Hard skills will typically only include technical skills that you acquired through training, education, or otherwise hands-on experience. Meanwhile, soft skills most often consist of personality traits and people skills.

Conclusion

Now that you have a good understanding of the required parts of a CV, knowing which additional (optional) sections to add can be a powerful tool to put yourself above similarly qualified candidates.

You can choose to include your referees, training and certifications, projects and freelance work, and maybe volunteer work.

Finally, stay clear and concise about what you want to show on your CV. There is so much competition out there; you cannot afford to make mistakes in what you communicate to others through your CV.

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