CV Tips 1-5

Tip1

Clear your mind of any previous advice you have had, together with any preconceptions about what you should or shouldn’t be doing. A lot of standard advice is very much that; and much of it is contradictory, flawed or counter-productive.

Tip2

At the same time, not all standard advice is bad. Some of it is good. The trick is sorting out the good from the bad. How do you do that?

Tip3

If you’re not sure how useful particular advice is (or otherwise), then one thing you can do is do little bit of research before implementing it.

Tip4

One thing you should bear in mind is the experience and credentials of the person giving the advice. For example, some of the CV advice on the Internet has been cobbled together by Web content writers and SEO techies, rather than real career sector professionals.

Tip5

If the advice is original and has been written by a genuine career sector professional, then any professional career advisor worth his/her salt should be happy to put his/her name to it. If they don’t, this could indicate that perhaps the advice isn’t original, the author isn’t sure of it, or it has been written by a non-career sector professional. Just be aware of that.

Moreover, even when a particular piece of CV advice comes from a career sector professional, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is any good; after all, not all career sector professionals write CVs (let alone day in day out), and very few at all have conducted even the slightest bit of research on what works best and doesn’t with CVs.

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