Types of CV

Most job seekers only have experience of writing one kind of CV – the traditional chronological CV where one’s employment and education history are presented in reverse, chronological order.

The chronological CV works well in many instances, especially where you have a stable career progression, developed in a series of jobs over a number of years. However, for a variety of reasons, you may want to consider adopting an alternative approach to constructing your CV.

For example, the following categories of jobseekers are usually not best served by the traditional chronological CV:

School Leavers.
New Graduates.
People wanting to make a career change.

School leavers and graduates don’t have a great wealth of work experience to use as evidence of their skills and qualities. People wanting to change career who employ the traditional CV format may struggle to win over employers who are immediately presented with a list of jobs that seem irrelevant.

For these kinds of job seekers, a functional CV approach may be more rewarding. The functional CV focuses attention immediately on transferable skills or 'potential'. Whereas a chronological CV begins with a reverse chronological presentation of jobs, the functional CV begins with and devotes most space to a generalised presentation of skills and qualities. If you write a CV in this way you are able to select experiences from your employment and educational experiences and match these up with the qualities an employer is looking for. In a chronological CV the reader has to figure out himself what your transferable skillset is. In a functional CV you leave him in no doubt from the very outset. The employment section of a functional CV is reduced to a simple list of dates worked, company names and job titles. All relevant experiences from these jobs will have been discussed in the initial skills summary.

Elements of both CV types – chronological and functional – can be selected to construct a truly persuasive and impressive record of your achievements in a combined CV. A combined CV will incorporate both the initial skills summary of a functional CV and the traditional, lengthier presentation of your employment history.

1 comment:

Peter @ Enviroman said...

Hi CV Teacher,

Thanks for taking the time to comment in my post Add Google sitemap to your blog and the compliments.

Peter (Blog*Star 2006 and 2007)
Testing Blogger Beta (now New Blogger)