Job Skills: Prepare your English CV for a job in the UK

Hello, everyone. I'm Jade. What we're talking about today is your British English CV. Maybe

you want to put together your first British English CV to apply for jobs in the UK. So

in this video, I'm going to tell you what's standard, and I'll tell you a little bit about

it, so that you can create your first or an improved British English CV.

So what we're going to talk about first is the format of your CV. Because we... There's

not like one CV that's... Everybody does. There are conventions, there are set ways

of doing it, but within that, there is some leeway; you can do different things. And this

is important when we think about format, because it really depends what experience you have,

which format you're going to choose, because you want to use your CV to sell yourself.

So if you've got a lot of experience behind you, then you want to do a chronological CV,

with your most recent job and then going backwards. We usually have the most detail... Or no,

we do. We have the most detail for the most recent or current job, and then after that,

the previous job, some detail as well. But generally after that, we don't really say

much about the jobs that far in the past. And that's the key difference that I've seen

on many CVs when I'm looking at CVs from people from Italy or Spain or wherever. They usually

have a lot of detail for past jobs that were quite a long time ago, whereas we don't really

say so much about things that were in the past, especially if they were more than two

years ago. Yeah.

What if you don't really have much experience, well what do you do then? Well, you put your

education in the first position. So, you would want to put your education first. In the experience

CV, the education isn't the most important thing; that can go at the end or on the second page.

And what if you're a freelance worker or a temporary worker? So, you've got lots of little

jobs, what do you do then? Well, you choose a format where you're grouping your experience

in most important projects that you did. It's not really about the time that you worked

on something; it's about the skills that you acquired. So in this kind of CV, you really

need to express all your skills, not how long it was, how long you were there, and this

kind of thing like in a normal job.

What not to include, then, on your British English CV? I think there's a difference between

what's the law about what not to include and what's the actual practice. Because by law,

we're not meant to put our date of births or photographs on CVs. But, it's, it does

happen for certain kinds of jobs. Let's take this example: you move to London, and you're

trying to get a job in London, and you want to do a waitressing job or a bar job, or something

like that. If you go into independent places, independent places and maybe not like... Maybe

they don't really know about the law, and actually they do want to know how old you

are. So, in... I'm not telling you to do it, I'm just saying that it happens that some

people choose to put this information on their CVs.

I, this is a just a personal thing of mine: on a CV, I just find it completely pointless

that somebody puts headings like "email" and then puts an email address after it with a

name in it, because it's obviously your email. It's like a word that we don't need. We don't

need to see that on the CV. Same with "mobile". We know what a mobile number looks like. So

pointless headings I don't like, and also, I don't like the title at the top, when somebody

writes "CV" or "Curriculum Vitae" which is a Latin word, because we obviously know it's

a CV. So, I'm against pointless extra words on CVs.

I'm also kind of against the hobby section, which is always a bit lame. Not always. Unless

you've got an awesome hobby. But, you know, most people like reading and socializing,

don't they? So, just think about it. It's probably not worth it. But what you could

do in place of "hobbies" is "membership of organizations". So you can... This means,

you know, if you belong to any clubs or societies, you can put that... Those things down there,

and they can say something about yourself and your interests, rather than you just saying

these general hobbies; not very useful.

Also, you're going to have this problem: when you come to the UK and trying to get work,

people are very unlikely to know the names of your qualifications. It's just going to

be like: "All right, well I don't know what that is." So, what can you do in that sense?

You could consider writing "equivalent to". Find out what your qualification is equivalent

to. What is it the same level as in the British system? So if we're talking about standard

school qualifications, GCSE is the level of exam you do when you're 16; everybody has

to do it. And A-level is the level of exam you do when you're 18, and you don't have

to do that. You choose to stay in school longer to do that. And then the next level is degree,

so this could be a BA, or a BSc in the British system. We have lots and lots of other qualifications.

I haven't put anything down about skills-based training and that kind of thing. You'd need

to research that yourself, because these are, you know, so many different qualifications

you can have. But that's an important point that British employers are probably not going

to recognize your qualification unless you tell them what it means. When we come back,

we're going to look in more detail about what you should put on your British CV.

Let's have a look at what could be advantageous for you to include on your British CV. Because

if you're applying for jobs here, employers, they're looking for someone easy, someone

who can start, someone who already knows the country, someone who's available to work.

So, if you can manage to include a UK phone number, a UK address, and a UK email address,

that's going to help you out a bit, because it will be suggesting that you're already

in the country. If you are already in the country, and for some reason you're not including

these things, this is really not helpful for your wish to get a job.

And a lot of people stick with their email program that they use in their own country,

so if you're Italian, you might use that. But this, again, is just suggesting that you're,

like, a foreigner. Foreigner, basically. I don't like that word, but anyway, that's what

it's suggesting. So people don't really... People don't use that here. The main ones

are Gmail and Hotmail, but Hotmail is not really seen as a... Something professional

to have that.

What else to say? Talking about the actual format of your CV: it's standard just to have

a two-page CV. So even if you've got 20 years of experience doing lots of different things,

you need to compress all that information just to two pages. People are not interested

in reading really, really, really long CVs. You should include page numbers, as well.

And I always suggest: don't just put the page number in automatically. Show how many pages

you have as part of your CV. So, it should say "1 of 2" or "2 of 2" so that when somebody's

looking at your CV, they know they have all the relevant parts that they need, and if

one gets lost, they know that something's missing.

I'm a fan, means I like, using bullet points in CVs. You don't write in complete sentences.

But you need to be careful of doing very, very long lists of bullet points, so I would

say between four or six bullet points for a heading. Don't overuse them in the space

of one heading. Also to do with formatting, it's standard to use 11 or 12 pt, so not really,

really big writing. We also like Arial or Times New Roman. Make sure you don't put that

Comic Sans in there on your CV. It's not right for your CV. It's not right for anything,

especially not right for a CV. And don't be too crazy with your style, so draw attention

to different parts, and your sections, by using a mixture of bold, underline, or center.

So play around with formatting like that.

Let's have a look at the sections to include. So you don't need to include all of these,

but these are different sections that you could. And again, we don't necessarily need

to use them as a title. So, you don't need to put a title saying "personal information"

when you put your name and your address and these kind of things. You don't need it, but

it's an option if you want to. A personal statement or summary: this is a very, very

short two-sentence introduction to yourself, basically. Who you are, and what you're looking

for. We'll look at that in further detail in a sec.

You can also include education and qualification section. You don't necessarily need to put

the word "and" in there, you could put a dash there, put a line there, to break it up. Then,

these other... Again, if you don't want to use extra words, you don't even need to put

"work experience", you could just say "experience", and then start to list your most relevant

experience underneath it.

You can have a skills section. What do you put in a skills section? Well, this would

be something like the programs you could use, can use. So you can put Microsoft Office,

any relevant software that you know how to use. It could be like a database that you

know would have a... Whatever the name of the database is. Or maybe you've got design

skills, so you could put Adobe on here.

Anyway, you know your skills. Put them in the "skills" section.

What I really like to see on CVs is a section where you talk about your achievements, like

what have you actually done in your job, which you're like pleased with, and shows results?

Because when someone's just looking at a CV, and it's information, information, information,

it's hard to know what really like stands out, what we should know about the person.

So make it easy for whoever's looking at your CV. Put some key achievements there that are

targeted for the job you're applying to. So, yeah. Just know that people are not really

going to closely read every single thing; you need to make it easy for them. We'll talk

about this a little bit as well.

We touched on this a minute ago: I don't like the "hobby" section, so you can replace that,

if you feel like you want to, with "interests". You could call it a different word, basically.

Interests. Your interests are reading, and sport. No, I don't think you should do that.

But anyway, if you have an interesting interest, include it in the interests section. And as

I said earlier, you could include memberships of professional organizations. This sounds

quite impressive sometime.

References in a British CV are generally separate; you don't put them on the CV itself. But I

do occasionally see it where somebody will write "references" and put the names of two

people there, and their contacts. Very rarely, but most of the time if anything is said,

it's: "References Available on Request", which means: "I'm happy to give you the information

of my references", the people who will say that I'm a great worker or whatever: "If you

want to. If we get to that stage, I'll give you that information."

Then there'll also be an additional section, sometimes, and in there you can put anything

that you haven't covered yet. So it could be you could say: "Full and clean UK driver's

license", if you've got a UK driver's license. Or sometimes you could put in like: "First

aid training". I also see that's first aid certificate. I also see that in the additional

section sometimes. When we come back, we will do extra work on what to include on your CV.

Now, we're going to look at some of the sections that I mentioned before, but I'll give you

some examples of things that you might include. So, I mentioned before achievements. You should

use your CV to really sell yourself for the particular job you're going for. So I did

an example here. This would be an example of someone looking for a sales kind of position,

and I thought: "What kind of thing could they say about themselves to make themselves seem

like a really good candidate for a job?"

So, this imaginary person was awarded Salesperson of the Month in July. We should probably put

the year as well. Maybe... Also, it should be recent. It wouldn't be very good to put

like 1992 there, that's a bit long ago. Yeah, so put the year. What year is it? I sometimes

forget. I have forgotten. And then you'd put the name of the store, wherever this happened.

Also, this imaginary person was such a good salesperson that they exceeded their sales

targets by 20%, so they sold more than they were asked to do by their company. They're

so good. And this individual also went above and beyond the call of duty. That's an idiom

for doing more than is expected of you. They developed an induction for new staff members,

so that means that they put some training together for new people joining the company.

So that suggests that this person is responsible. Yeah, someone who's a bit better than your

average staff member, because they've been given responsibility here. Or maybe they used

initiative, we don't know.

So, including this kind of thing and putting it at the top of your CV is a really good

way to attract attention. Imagine a really big pile of CVs. When you make it easy for

them to know how great you are, you've got a better chance of being called for interview.

Here's an example now of the experience section for the same imaginary person. We start by

putting the job title, what is it that you did, and we say... The terms that we use in

CVs change. So, the word you might know for this job, but actually people don't really

use now, is "salesman". But because it says "man", and this is kind of sexist language,

we don't say it in that way now, we say like "consultant" is gender-neutral; it could be

a man, it could be a woman. So yeah, start with the job title, then the name of the place,

then the area, and then a city. Sometimes it's very revealing to say the area, because

it shows the prestige of your job. So, if you say the area, it shows that, you know,

maybe it suggest that this was a very great place to work, or something, based on the area.

Then, it's really helpful to have a descriptive line, where you say not only what the... Yeah,

you just explain a little bit about the place you worked at, because the person looking

at your CV might not know the name of the company; it might not mean anything to them.

So if you just put in a sentence explaining what that company is and what they do, the

employer can see that: "Oh, is that a match for us? Is this relevant to what we do here?"

Then, I've got a couple of bullet points. You could use these to think about what you

would put on your CV. This imaginary person in their job, these are some of the duties.

And it's in this format, because this job still exists for this person. "Assisting customers

with purchases." They're still in this job. This is a current job. If it's a past job,

then you would write: "Assisted customers with purchases." They're still in this job,

so they say: "Providing product knowledge to customers. Helping them. Telling them about

the products in the store." They also in their job are acting as casher or cashing up. And

if you notice something, in these bullet points, we're keeping the same format. So if we've

got "ing", we're using "ing" throughout, we're not changing it around. And also notice that

it's not full sentences. It's not: "I am assisting", okay? We don't need to use full sentences.

This is a format when we're writing bullet points, we can do like this.

And let's lastly take a look at the education section. As I mentioned before, if you have

education... Qualifications from your own country, people are not really going to know

about them in England. So, that line you can put in is "equivalent to", just so people

know what we're talking about. What they like to see is the most recent or highest qualification

you have, so you can put that in. A-level is typically, people do three, sometimes they

do four of them. And then, there's less detail. So if you want to write... If you want to

mention your GCSE level qualification, which is lower, it's okay to say something like:

"Nine subjects B to C grade". You don't need to write every subject you took and the exact

mark; it's not so relevant. People just want a general idea of your qualifications most

of the time.

So, I really hope that was helpful for you, and you can, based on this, develop a really

good British CV that's going to get you the job that you want. You can also go to the

engVid website and do a quiz on this, so make sure you got all the important details about

what you really do need to include on a British CV.

If you like this video, please do subscribe on my channel, here. I've got lots of other

videos about learning English that might be of interest to you. I've also got another

YouTube channel, so I've got two YouTube channels; you could subscribe in both places. I'd really

appreciate that. So, I'm going to go and read a really big pile of CVs now.

And come back and join me again sometime, okay?

Bye.