Building your CV over Summer

With college and university academic years coming to an end, Summer is upon us. Obviously, now is the time to relax and take time to yourself and recharge after a tough year in University. However, if you’re looking for something to fill your time over the Summer, why not build up your CV?

Whether you’re moving to a new city for University and are going to be looking for a new job; simply want a career change, or just need some time to be filled, sprucing up your CV is not ridiculously hard.

Volunteer

A huge tip of mine is use unpaid/volunteer experience to your advantage. Whilst being unpaid is not ideal and for man, not financially viable, if you can do it, it is worth doing. It is an investment into your future and career and will easily set you apart from other candidates without the experience. Not only will this help pad out the experience section of your CV, it will also help you fill the skills section out as you will have further work experience to draw from.

Online courses

There are plenty of free online courses that can aid you in filling out your CV. They don’t have to be directly correlating to your desired career, anything that may help you be set apart from other candidates. Taking a course in something like leadership may not correlate directly to a certain career, it is an all-round skill that many employers will value. Taking courses that will allow you to improve as a candidate don’t have to be subject specific and once again, give you more experience to draw from for the skills section.

Use your experience to your advantage

Focus on all elements of your past positions. It may make you feel over the top embellishing your CV but try it. I took some inspiration from this Tiktok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeGjcgb9/. If you worked in retail, instead of saying you folded clothes, say you kept a clean and organised inventory. If you worked in hospitality, instead of saying you told customers what was on the menu, say you memorised menu items and gave personal and customised recommendations to customers. You need to sell yourself to employers and using the basic language is so common that when a recruiter or employer sees a new take on this, it will allow you to stick in their mind.

Education

Speak about your education, even if you’ve not been to university. You can explain how your courses have trained you and enabled you to do X, Y, Z. It will give your future employers the impression that you can translate and apply your education to real-world situations. You can explain what you’ve learned from having to juggle multiple things occurring in your life. Your education may also be linked to the field that you want to go in so employers can see that you already have a grasp on the subject matter.

There’s always ways that you can improve your CV and with summer coming up, there is ample time to do it.