CV Writing Skill

Have you ever wondered what the most valuable certificate is in IT and especially in Software Development Industry? If you google the phrase "Top IT Certificates", you will get many articles telling you about that. Normally they will be issued by Microsoft, Cisco, Sun and even PMI. Now, I have a question for you. Please ensure you will answer the question before you read the next paragraphs. What is the most valuable certificate for you?

While Microsoft, Cisco and other organizations issue certificates to certify that you are mature/expert in some knowledge areas, there is one special certificate which you can certify yourself. It is your Curriculum Vitae !!! Let’s start the debate if you disagree.

1. Introduction
I have been working with recruitment teams for CV screening and CV selection, I have also experienced with sending CVs of people from my team to client for their selection. I have realized that not many people really pay attention to what they should write in the CV or they don’t really focus while writing the CV. Let me tell you a very simple recruitment process as below.

When recruiting one position, the recruitment team can receive up to 20, 30 or even more CVs. The first step is to screen the CVs by scanning through them quickly to see if there are some words matching the job requirement. After having about … 5 CVs, they will sort these CVs and choose the best 2 or 3 CVs for interviewing. So, if a CV isn’t written well, it won’t be in the top 5 selected ones. If a CV is written OK but not attractively, it won’t be in the top 3 final ones.

As I mentioned above, the CV is not only for applying for the job, it is also to certify who you are, what achievements you have made, what skills and experiences you have gained and so forth. After all, you should be proud of your CV and it is the only certificate which you have been working hard to get and you are the only one who can issue it.

Having a good working history is very important to have an attractive CV. I hope the series of "Road to Destination" articles could help you on this.

2. Background
If you’re working under software projects, your CV should be structured like this.

Your name Your expected position

Summary A few paragraphs to describe your entire employment history.

Skill & Certificates A table or a list of bullets to describe your skills such as C#, Java, SQL Server, Oracle, …

Experience This section lists out all projects which you have joined. Each of them should have a structure as below.

From MMM/yyyy to MMM/yyyy Project name     Employer A brief description on what the project is about Role: Responsibilities: Some bullets to tell what you did in the project. Technologies: Technologies used in the project

Additional Information Education Languages Awards Recommendation References

Personal Information Birthday Marital status Phone numbers IM Website Address

3. Writing Tips
I won’t step into detail of each part, but there are some tips which can make your CV staying on top of the others.

The first part
A CV with a good-looking picture is always more attractive than just plain text. Moreover, your expected position shouldn’t be fixed and should match with the job which you are about to apply for. So, you should update it before sending out.

Profile Summary
The most important part of a CV is the profile Summary. All information which is described in the other parts should be found in this summary part. Instead of reading through so many pages to understand who you are, the reader can quickly have this by just reading the summary in a minute or two. Moreover, the information you put here must be quantitative if possible, otherwise qualitative. Let me give you some examples

Normal writing	Recommended writing
I am a strong experienced engineer in Software Development industry.	With over 7 years of experience in Software Development industry.
I have worked a lot with .NET web platform and also Java based applications.	I have worked with .NET web platform for 5 continuous years and Java based applications for 6 continuous years.
I used to work in big projects with multi-national client.	The biggest project which I used to work was 20 people in 24 months. In this project, I had opportunity to communicate directly with people from US, UK and APAC.

Skill & Certificates
Another important part is describing your skills and the same rule is still applied here, try to make it quantitative as much as possible. So, it is recommended to use a table to list out all of your skills followed by years of experience, level of expertise and last usage time. Let’s see one example:

Skill	Years of Experience	Level	Last Used
Programing
Java	5	Can advise the other	Present
C++	4	Can work without coaching	May-2010
Php	2	Can work under coaching	March 2009
Database
Oracle Development	4	Can work without coaching	Present

Specifying your role:
In many cases, I see that people didn’t write the right role which they actually played. Instead, they put their company position which doesn’t really reflect to what they did. One specific example:

Role: Senior System Engineer Responsibilities: * Working with client to get their requirement * Managing the requirement and allocating work to a team of 5 people * Managing the performance of the whole team * Investigating and defining the solution * …

With the responsibilities as described, the role of this person should be a Team Leader or a Project Leader. Most people don’t really understand why a Senior Software Engineer can take ownership of those tasks, but by mentioning a Project Leader or a Team Leader, people will easily imagine that this person has experienced with managing a team and/or a project.

4. Conclusion:
Again, to be on top of the others when applying for a job, your CV must be written attractively (not cheating but telling the truth as it is). Make sure if someone spends a few seconds looking at your CV, they will read the rest.

To achieve this purpose, keep in mind the guidelines below:

* The profile summary is the most important section, all strengths and key skills must be put there.
* Trying to be quantitative as much as possible.
* Specifying your past roles in the right way.
* A good-looking picture.

To be more practical on what I have presented, I have also put here a sample CV.