I thought I'd list some of the advice given to me by my job coach so far:
1. Your CV must be short, and no more than three sides of A4. Apparently the details of what you've done, where, and what useful experience you've had is all teased out at interview.
2. It should start with your name and contact information aligned on the left hand side.
3. It is common for Swedish CVs to include a picture of the person. This is usually opposite the personal information
4. You should have a personal / professional summary paragraph which should be between 4-8 sentences long. It should summarize your approach to work and your most noteworthy personal attributes.
5. List any professional qualifications
6. List technical skills and rate your experience or ability
7. Next list your employment history from your most recent position. For each job:
- state the length of time you were employed there (as month year e.g. October 2004 - March 2008),
- your job title
- the city or location of the job
- a summary of your job's key responsibilities
- Institution
- Course name
- length of course
- Grade
If you've been working a few years, you'll find you feel that you've maimed your CV and it seems devoid of any substantial information. I've been told not to include details of any projects I work on (standard practice for both technical and project management CVs back in the UK), which makes me wonder how anyone could judge suitability for a position based solely on the rough description of what you did in each role?
I guess that your job coach knows what he/she's talking about. Technical Swedish CVs I have seen have a sort of personal cover page detaining education etc, followed by 2 to 3 pages of employment history showing pretty much every project that they ever worked on. With dates, locations and project descriptions. Without exception. Exactly as you suggested.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I found strange cutting out the meat of what you've been working on. How would you know whether of not a candidate is interesting or not?
ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely convinced that the coach I picked (on the basis that they'd know about the IT sector) knows anything about the sector. She's very pleasant, but I'm beginning to get a bit negative about the process, mainly as it isn't what they explained at the Arbetsförmedlingen. What nags away at me is that there must be a fundamental problem, you don't discard candidates based on the format of a CV. I've read and interviewed enough people to be able to pick out useful information from one, so I don't really buy it.