Improving Your CV, Chapter 6: Choosing and updating the style of your CV

Part of Course 1: Improving your CV · Chapter 6 of 29 · 21 min

About this chapter

Style matters because your CV has to survive being scanned, edited and pasted by several people. I show why I'm not keen on the default Word and Canva templates, then walk through the plain, single-column Word layout I prefer and why.

Key points

• Templates are designed to look good, not to sell your experience; two-column layouts squeeze your experience into a fraction of the page and encourage bullet points written to fit the space.
• Be cautious about objective statements; the reader doesn't care about your objective and it can rule you out of related roles.
• Photos are usually removed in the UK, and designer touches often break as soon as you paste in real content.
• My preference: your name, contact details on a single line so they can be deleted easily, a short summary, then straight into company name, dates on the right, job title and bullets.
• Plain Word formatting makes it easy to cut, paste and reuse bullet points between versions.
• Whatever you choose, use as much of the page as possible to show how good you are.

Watch this chapter on YouTube · Full course playlist · All 29 chapters

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