Getting your CV straight

What is the difference between a Résumé and a CV?

Since the expression "curriculum vitae" is Latin for "course of life", a CV should be a summary of your main experiences on paper. It is retrospective in the way that in only lists things that have been. It does not consider the future as a cover letter does..

"Résumé" is synonymous with "summary", but you should not see it as a summary of your life but rather as a single paper summary of your total job application (what you want from the job and why just you should have it). The emphasis on a résumé is on your career objective. The experience you list on a résumé should be relevant and supportive of your goal.

CVs usually comes with the retrospective sections such as "Personalia, Positions, and Education", while the résumé is equipped with visionary, current, and retrospective sections.


What are the typical features of a CV?

If you wish to send out your CV to various companies, keep your Curriculum short, that is to say no longer than 2 pages. Thus, by keeping your CV and résumé short, you minimise the risk of being sorted out simply because it looked too extensive to easily scan through. Also, if you can summarise yourself on one side of a single sheet of paper, that goes to show that you are an organised and rational person -- very nice qualities in any potential employee.

If your CV is intended to go out to universities or other academic fields, you should be prepared to state all your academic achievements, publications, degrees, etc. This can, of course take up a couple of pages.

Do not use "Curriculum Vitae" as the heading on your CV. Most people will be able to tell what kind of document it is without any help. Your intended receivers of the CV/résumé most certainly will. Use your own full name as heading instead.

Whatever the CV you wish to send out, it should at least include the following:

• Career Objective
• Qualification Summary
• Experience
• Personalia Positions
• Education Positions

You can also include the following:

• Personalia Education
• Awards & Honours (Extracurricular Activities)
• Language Proficiency
• Publications
• Detailed description of some key positions held in various jobs
• Recreation References

And since within the field of Computer Science, good skills in spoken and written English are today often required, a nice CV/résumé in English is a subtle way of verifying a claim to be fluent in English.
What information should the different sections hold?

Personalia

This is the section where you collect all the small bits that do not fit anywhere else, like your age, nationality, marital status, what kind of driver's license you have (if any), star sign, and such.
It is also here that you put your address and phone number, so that you may be contacted by the company if they want to hire you. However, address and phone numbers are suitable to be placed in the page header instead, whereafter you can leave out the Personalia section completely and thus save precious space for more important information!

Career Objective

This sentence should be at the top of your CV and sum up what your goals is/are.

Try to think about what your goals in life are, what you want to become, whether you would rather be an executive officer or a guru, figure out your strengths and weaknesses…Often you can borrow a title from the place ad and put here, but you should also add a little of your hopes, dreams and intentions. It is a tough section, but an important one.

The best Career Objective should only be one or two normal length sentences, so the example below is really too long. If you simply do not know or cannot phrase a realistic objective that might please the new employer, then it might be better if you leave this section out.
Example:
An executive creative position where extensive marketing, writing, management, design, and technical skills are required. Preferably within the fields of Database Management or Brain Surgery. Opportunity to seize world leadership considered a plus.

Qualification Summary

Ask yourself what you know, not only what you have learned at university, but what you have picked up outside classes too. Which of these skills are relevant to the job you are applying for? Which skills do you have that maybe is not of direct importance for the job, but that you are pretty proud of anyway? List these;

This is why you should not have a general CV and/or résumé, but should write a special one explicitly for each job you want to apply for. Luckily, most of the CV or résumé is the same, so you can keep a general one and then only update it corresponding to each place ad every time you use it to apply for a new position.

Positions/Experience

This is the most important section in every CV or résumé, except for students who have yet to get any real work experience. Here you list the jobs you have had. In the beginning you list them all, but when you have had a few, you can only list those that are of relevance to the new job you are applying for.

You should also write a short but expressive description of what responsibilities the positions included. Here you should always use action verbs and remember to sell yourself.
Example:
January 2000 - January 2001: The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, USA Senior Flavour Engineer Investigated and implemented a new line of extremely popular beverages with untraceable additions of a variety of illegal, addictive substances.


Education

This is a pretty self-explanatory section. Here you list your university degrees, or, in case you have not actually graduated yet, the educational programme you are/were enrolled in. If you happen to have more than one degree, list them all.

When you have been working for several years and have had a few different jobs, your actual education loses its direct importance and can even be left out. Then it is the jobs you have had and what you have done that defines your knowledge and skills, not what education you once took.

Publications

This is most common in academic CVs, but it happens that people in industry, especially those within Research and Development, have papers on their findings published. You might even have had a chance to write a book in the area of your special expertise? Naturally, such an achievement looks good on a CV.
Professors often have mighty long Publications sections, as it is their task as professional researchers to spread the result of their research via papers and books.

Awards & Honours

Have you ever won any award? Or qualified to some impressing contest, even if you did not win? You might perhaps be the subject of some scholarship? Perhaps you do not think it is that big of a deal, but a potential employer might. If you can remember anything relevant, add it under a section of this type.
Example:
April 1999: Crown Princess Victoria's Award for Outstanding Computer Science Studies.
August 1997 - August 1998: Fulbright Scholarship, for studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Extracurricular Activities

This is only valid in a CV/résumé for job-seeking during your education and the first years after your graduation.
After you have had a few real jobs, the extracurricular activities often do not seem as important as before.
Extracurricular activities are the activities you were engaged in at university beside your studies, they can be of any sort really, as long as you think that they can help describe yourself better, and maybe give extra information about yourself. These activities can range from being an active member in a students' association, a guitar player in the college band or a university canoe champion.

Language Proficiency

Today, the marketplace is more and more internationalised. Companies have offices, branches, and/or business in other countries. If you know some foreign tongues, you are naturally more valuable to an employer who frequently has business abroad. Thus you should list the languages you know -- and how well you know them.
Remember to be positive about yourself. Rather than estimating your skills in some language as "poor", list them as "basic". Try a scale along the lines of: basic, average, fluent, native.
Example:
Swedish: native, English: fluent, German: basic


Recreation

Here you list important hobbies and favourite pastimes -- especially if they can be of interest to a potential employer. Do not list anything that might put you in a bad light. Thus you should list associations and sports your are active in, as well as special interests like bird watching or opera, but you should not list membership in the Ku Klux Klan or connections with the Mafia (unless, of course, you have reasons to believe that it might get you the job).
Example:
Maintaining Open Software, singing in a choir, coaching a kid's soccer team, playing chess, and travelling.

References

Can anyone testify to what you state in you CV/résumé? Do they want to do that? Who would you like a potential employer to talk to about you?

If you are going to include some references in your CV/résumé, or in the personal letter, remember to first ask the persons you want to use if it is okay with them. If it is, list them with name, title, and contact information (at least email address and/or phone number), so that paranoid new employers can check with them to verify that you really are the right one to hire.

The most commonly used references must be former managers or favourite lecturers/professors if you still are a student, but it does not have to be. Previous employers can account for your work skills, but not always of your social skills, nor how you are as a person. Today, these kinds of considerations often play an important role when looking for a new employee. Thus it can be advantageous to also list one of your best friends (preferably someone who is eloquent) as a personal reference (that is the title you use on your friend, regardless of his/her profession).