If you have no work experience; check out my video guide to writing a CV when you have no experience. Your CV profile or personal statement is your opening pitch to recruiters and employers. It will be the first thing they read upon opening your CV, so you need to give them some good reasons to be interested in you. Ideally, you want to summarise the skills you have to offer an employer, in a way which reflects the qualities that they are looking for in a candidate — so again you should be referring to the list you made earlier.
Take a look at the example CV profile below. This person is a school leaver with A-levels who is applying for office based sales roles. However, they do have some part time supermarket cashier experience which involves some of the same skills and experience. So they have really taken advantage of that. The trick is to write for the job you want , not the job you have. Really sell yourself to the reader. Many school leavers think that their part time jobs in bars and retail stores bear no relevance to the jobs they apply for when they start working full time.
However there a lot of transferable skills that you can include in your CV, and by using the right language, you can create a very professional image with them — like the above.
Quick tip: If you struggle with written English, try using a free grammar checking tool like Grammarly to eliminate the risk of making mistakes.
In order to give recruiters a very quick glimpse of your skills, use a bullet pointed core skills and achievements section. As I mentioned earlier, recruiters and managers tend to be very busy — so a bullet pointed list of valuable skills and achievements can give them a really quick snapshot of your talents, and encourage them to read the rest of your CV in full.
If like most school leavers, you do not have any direct work experience in the field you are applying to, I would recommend listing your education next. Include plenty of detail to compensate for your lack of work experience — especially if your education can be related to the jobs you are applying for.
Self motivated individual who works hard, communicates well and has good interpersonal skills. Recently completed A levels and seeking employment in a business field that will help develop my knowledge base. Have 2 years experience in customer service field and retail sales.
Seeking an entry level trainee position where I can make a good contribution to the company. You can use something like the Problem-Action-Result formula to help structure your bullet points.
The tendency, as a result, is to want to inflate your school-leaver CV education section as much as possible. The trick is to do the exact opposite: keep it brief and on-point, bloat- and padding-free. Do follow the following guidelines. Stick with a reverse-chronological order for your education section. Employers often need to see that you have passes in Maths and English as a bare minimum. Do list all your A-levels, though. One more thing, if you have very little work experience , you might want to move your education section above the work history section to give it more prominence.
You should be able to prepare a list of skills for your school leaver CV that covers everything mentioned in the job advert and then some. This is just how job hunting goes. Open a new document and list as many of your skills as you can. Ideally this would mean at work, but it could also be at school or as part of your extracurricular activities or hobbies. Save the file. Like now, for instance. Copy 5—10 skills from your master list into your school-leaver CV. Your school leaver CV is bound to end up being pretty similar to other good school leaver CVs out there.
Foreign languages are really almost always relevant, given their associated benefits. When it comes to activities and interests, look for skills that translate well into the workplace.
Otherwise, your job application is always going to be made up of two main parts: your school leaver CV and a cover letter that you wrote especially for the given application. A good school leaver cover letter will be between half an A4 page and one A4 page long, about — words in total. Its overall structure will be set by the standard UK business letter format. All such letters have a certain kind of header, salutation and sign-off.
These will bookend the body of your cover letter. The body paragraphs are where the science of writing a cover letter blends into an art. A call to action or CTA is when you take the initiative and suggest a follow-up conversation.
Use the fact that your CV is on the shorter side to nicely space things out in clearly defined subsections.
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