"What's Your Problem" series #3 - Troubleshooting Your CV

If you have sent your CV off in response to lots of job adverts, but haven’t been having any success, then your CV might be suffering from one of these common problems:

1.   Too descriptive – Reads like a narrative or like a ‘cut and paste’ from your job description.  Lots of detail about what your duties or responsibilities are, but little analysis of what your results or achievements have been.

Remember, your CV isn’t your life history; it is your personal marketing brochure.  Like a brochure, it should focus on the benefits you bring to an organisation, not on a list of things you have done.  Put the most beneficial tasks and outcomes, or those most relevant to the job you’re apply for, near the top of each section.  Make sure your skills and achievements are clearly stated.

2.   Too assumptive – Leaves the reader to assume what your skills are from the mere fact of where you have worked, what your job titles have been or the length of your experience.   Assumes that the reader is going to be a librarian or information professional who ‘gets it’ and will understand.

Both of these assumptions are likely to be wrong.  The reader is more likely to be from HR, or to be a senior line manager who doesn’t come from a library background.  Even if a librarian is involved, they may not make the leap from your job titles or lists of duties to believing you have the skills they feel are necessary to do the job they’re advertising.

A CV should have as its primary goal communicating your key skills clearly to the reader.  As a test, give your CV to a friend, without any hints, and ask them to tell you what you main skills are.  Make sure they tell you skills, not ‘things you have done’, or experiences.  Can they see what your skills are?  Are the skills they come up with the ones you expected?  Are they the relevant skills for the job you’re applying for?

3.   Doesn’t look professional.  You are an information professional; part of your core skill set should be presenting and communicating information.  If your CV is poorly laid out, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors or typos and hard to read then you are demonstrating that you fall down in this key skill area.

Your CV needs to be well designed.  There are lots of CV templates and examples available in books and on the internet to give you ideas.  Make sure that you use a professional looking font, use enough white space to make it pleasant to read, and use bullet points, bold, a larger font size, indented paragraphs or columns to make sure the information is well laid out and key points are highlighted.

4.   Lacks key words. While your organisation may call the intranet their ‘Knowledge Base’ or another jargon term, the reader of your CV or the agency doing a text search of your CV is more likely to use the generic, well known, term.  Make sure you ‘translate’ organisation jargon into everyday terms.

If your CV is going being uploaded to an employer’s CV database or to an agency, then their system may not be able to read text inside text boxes or tables, so it is better not to use them in those circumstances.  These databases can parse text and pick out key words to populate skill code fields in the database.  Make sure you include the right key words for the type of job you are seeking in the plain text areas of your CV.

Addressing some of these issues with your CV and making sure that your skill, achievements and passion for your work stand out will greatly increase your chances of getting an interview.

Tailoring your CV, so that the skills and experiences most relevant for the job you’re applying for are found near the top of each section, will also help you get to the top of the list for shorlisting for interview.

So you want to do a Skills Audit?

Bethan Ruddock spoke recently at the CILIP New Professionals Day 2012, on the topic of her book The New Professional’s Toolkit published recently by Facset. Although I wasn’t present for her talk, I followed events on Twitter and noticed several mentions of her advice to carry out a skills audit. 


Over many years working in library recruitment I’ve noticed that people often find it hard to answer the interview question ‘what skills do you have?’ Sometimes people offer one or two software packages that they can use (an LMS or online database, for example). Often people look blank or get embarrassed and can’t think of anything. 


I believe there is a clear and direct linkage between someone’s skills (proficiency acquired through training or experience) and their ability to progress in the career direction they want. This sounds obvious but, if so, why do so many CVs focus on a historical recounting of experiences and sideline or ignore skills? 


I think this is because many people find it very hard to analyse themselves, to tease out what their skills really are, and to articulate those in a concise way. It is easier to say what you’ve done, rather than what you’ve got out of doing it. 


So, how do you do a skills audit? As a career coach I offer people a range of exercises and worksheets to help, but in essence you need to review your experiences, and break down large chunks of experience (eg, “I do online research” or “I’ve managed an intranet”) into smaller tasks (eg, doing a reference interview, selecting online source(s), conducting searches, collating results, etc). For each of these tasks, you then need to think about what skill(s) you used to carry out each one. I find that imagining you were training a complete novice to carry out the task helps to envisage what skills you’re actually using. 


Once you’ve gone through all the tasks, for each of your experiences, you will have teased out all of the skills that you have. Of course there will be duplicates where you use the same skills to accomplish different tasks, which you can weed out. To get from this (probably long) list down to your key skills, I advise people to consider both how good they are at performing each skill, and how much they enjoy using it, then tally those two to reach a ‘score’ for each skill.


This article will be published in the CILIP SW Group newsletter shortly and is reproduced here with permission.

Event - BIALL Solos Presentation

Last week I was delighted to speak to a group of solo law librarians who are all members of the BIALL Solos group.  Slightly unusually, the presentation was conducted by telephone conference, with the slides distributed in advance.

This method of delivery allows people who are working in a team of 1, where getting cover to leave the office to attend a seminar isn't always realistic, and also where not all the members are based in London, to get together and share experiences.

The topic was all about how to develop your career when you are working as a solo.  We focused on two approaches to this - either to develop the scope of your current role &/or lobby to be able to grow your team, or else to move on a find a new role elsewhere.

Biall Solos - Career Development - September 2011

View more presentations from Nicola Franklin.

The slides from the presentation are above and this is a link to the audio recording of the talk (BIALL membership log in required).

We managed to cover a wide range of topics during the hour's session, ranging from how to develop a business case and cost/benefit analysis, through to skills analysis, writing effective CVs and preparing for a successful interview.

The Library Career Centre Launch Competition

** Winner Announced!! **

The winner of the launch competition of The Library Career Centre
is Imrana Ghumra, a Knowledge Manager from the Healthcare sector 

Imrana won a FREE CV Review Report

and said

"Wow, thank you!

I'll take a look over the weekend and then let you have an amended CV."

Event - ARA New Professionals Section - Summer Seminar

On Friday 19th August I spent a very enjoyable afternoon with the New Professionals Section of the ARA, listening to some interesting talks and running a careers workshop session.

First to speak was Dr Andrew Flinn, head of the archives and records management programme at UCL and also ex-chair of FARMER, who gave us a very enlightening talk about the factors affecting the content of archives and records management courses in the UK, and some ideas about their potential future direction.

Pressures include the massive increase in the range of areas and duties covered by archivists and records managers over the past 10 years, which means that a far wider range of skills are needed across the industry. However the time allocated to the courses hasn’t increased, and it has become increasingly difficult to fit everything in, and cover each to the required depth.

One solution to this issue that is emerging is to introduction of more specialist Masters courses (eg the one at University of Glasgow is more focused on digital continuity, while Northumbria University just does records management and not archives. Another likely scenario foreseen by Dr Flinn is that the current generalist courses offered by 5 of the 7 FARMER universities will move more towards a ‘core course + options’ model, with a higher number of more specialist options being offered.

These changes are leading to debates within the profession as to what should remain ‘core’ - in the past this would have undoubtedly included medieval paleography, for example, but now jobs for archivists have expanded beyond County Records Offices a lower proportion of roles call for this skills. Is there therefore a case for making this one of the specialist options?

After a lively coffee break with lots of networking and chatter going on round the room, we reconvened for the next hour and half with a careers workshop. I gave a talk covering what types of jobs the skills gained in archives & records management courses could be used for, where to find them, and how to decide which were the right one(s) for you, before focusing on how to write an effective CV and be successful at interview.

ARA New Professionals Career Workshop August 2011

We then rearranged the room into break-out groups (photo above) and people worked on firstly the layout, and secondly the content, of their CVs in groups of three or four. Those who preferred worked on some anonymised CVs, with common suggestions for improvements including:

• spend less space on the address/contact details
• use more bullet points
• move more relevant sections nearer the top

Once we had put the room back together into (more or less) neat rows of chairs, the final two speakers gave two very different but equally interesting talks. These slots were reserved for two new professionals to present, and one chose to talk about the specific archive in which they work, while the other gave an overview of all the different roles and responsibilities that now fall to the lot of an archivist, wherever they work.

Fabiana Barticioti of the V&A, who will be starting her Archives’ Masters course this September, gave us a multimedia rich presentation of her work with the dance materials archive held by the V&A. It was fascinating to see the dance choreography notation and then watch a video of a ballet dancer performing those particular moves.

Sarah Norman of the UK Debt Management Office, who qualified from UCL last year, looked at the Roles of an Archivist, which included:

• Lawyer (FoI and EIR requests)
• Project Manager (lots of funny terminology to get to grips with!)
• Procurement Officer
• Records Manager
• Stationer (from photocopying to supplying paper...)
• Detective (who, of course, knows where the files labelled ‘missing’ in the catalogue are to be found!)
• Line Manager (yes, even after 1 year’s experience)

Sarah said the role was a lot more varied, and more challenging, than she had imagined before hand, and with constraints on resources this shows no sign of diminishing.

As the members of the New Professionals Section got together to discuss what the members of this new SIG wanted from the group, I bowed out to go and catch my train. To round off a very pleasant afternoon the sun was shining, so I could walk along the Strand and over the bridge to Waterloo; in the daylight this time!

7 CV Blunders to Avoid

Setting out to draft your CV can be a daunting experience.  A blank sheet of paper awaits you, and you need to make decisions on layout, what sections to include, what dates you worked where.. the list goes on.

There are some blunders which crop up time and again, which you can avoid by paying attention to some quite simple tips:

1. Don’t write essays.   If you write lots of long paragraphs in your CV you are dramatically reducing the chances of anyone reading it.  Your CV is analogous to a marketing brochure.  It should send clear, straightforward and easy to digest messages to your intended audience.   
2. Don’t cram the space full.  Your messages will be lost if they are mired in a mass of text. Make sure you have a clear, simple layout using lots of white space, bold section headings and bullet points. Make your key skills easy to pick out, and relevant to the type of job you are applying for.
3. Don’t include a picture.  Unless you are applying for a job in some European countries (eg Germany), a picture or other graphics are only expected on CVs for the media industry and graphic designers.  Putting in a photograph just invites the person reviewing your CV to make subconcious judgements based upon your appearance.
4. Avoid using loads of different fonts or coloured fonts.  Multiple different fonts look messy. Stick to one font, and just vary the size for different levels of heading (eg Header 1 = your name = largest font size, then Header 2 = section headings = second largest size, then Header 3 = Company names = third largest size, etc).
5. Don’t lie.  Don't even be tempted to exaggerate the truth a bit.  It might get you the interview, but then you will be quizzed face to face and asked to give examples to demonstrate the skills you claimed to have.  Interviewers may also check out your online profiles and/or take up verbal peer references either before or after the interview.  Failing all that, if you get offered a job based on a lie, you will then be expected to perform to the standard you let your new employer to expect...
6. Don’t try and include everything you’ve ever done in your entire life.  While you need to avoid having gaps on your CV, there is no need to include the same level of detail about the bar jobs or retail work you did while a student as for your most recent information management role.  Devote more space and prominance to the most recent &/or most relevant skills and experience, which demonstrate your suitability for the jobs you are applying for.
7. Avoid being so generic that it could be anyone’s CV.  This particularly applies to the profile section.  While it's OK to use 'How to...' books and articles for inspiration, don't just copy down a cool-looking list of 'action words' to create your profile.  Make sure you write something personal, accurate and relevant to your skills, your career goals and the type of job you hope to get.

If you follow these steps, and if you have done a thorough skills analysis before putting pen to paper, you will be able to create an effective CV and raise your chances of securing interview invitations.

Effective CV Writing - where do I start?

Your CV is your personal marketing brochure – it should clearly demonstrate why you are the solution to the hiring problem faced by the employer.

If you bear this in mind as you set out to create or update your CV it will help you with all aspects of writing it – the structure, the content, the language to use and the best layout.

An invaluable exercise to do before you start putting pen to paper on your CV itself is a skills analysis.

Once you have a clear idea of the skills you have to offer, it is a good idea to prepare a skills matrix.   This equates each of your skills to an example showing how you demonstrated it.  You will be able to refer to this again and again throughout the job hunting process – writing your CV, assessing job adverts to see which ones suit you and preparing for interviews.

Influencing     -     Persuaded manager to do xx

Communication         -       Within a team

Organising     -     A collection of grey literature

Next you should think about which of the skills you have are particularly relevant to the job you are applying for – these should stand out loud and clear for anyone reading your CV.
Once your CV’s written, give it to a friend and ask them to pick out your key skills from it.  Don’t give them any hints!  Compare the skills they notice to the list you made of the skills needed for the job – do they match?  If not, your CV needs some more work!!

Remember, your CV is NOT a history of your life.  Your CV is your personal marketing brochure. 

With this in mind, you can see why you should NOT include:

·         Date of birth (age discrimination is now illegal in the UK)

·         Marital status (how does this show you are suitable for the job?)

·         A photograph (unless your physical appearance is a vital attribute for the job in question)

·         Number/ages of children (or pets) (again, does this have any bearing on your ability to do the job?)

Now you have a clear idea of which of your skills and experiences to emphasise in your CV, to match the job or type of jobs you will be applying for.

The next step is to decide on the order of the different elements, so that the most relevant are highlighted.

The key elements to include are:

·         Skills

·         Career History

·         Education & Qualifications

Other potential (optional) elements  you could include are:

·         Profile

·         Hobbies and Interests

·         Publications & speaking engagements

Within each element, make sure that the most relevant &/or recent item is placed at the top.  Within each item make sure that you order the bullet points so that the most relevant information is again at the top.

If you follow these steps, you will have made an excellent start to creating an effective CV which promotes you to the types of employer you are targeting.