With many university students preparing for their journey into the world of work, having an effective and well-written CV is a vital tool to stand out in a competitive job market. Natilly Macartney provides practical ideas to help you run a lesson centred on getting students to produce a well-tailored English CV.
As you may have read in my previous article, I teach business English at the Alpen-Adria University in Austria. In my most advanced business class, I have recently been working with the students on writing a CV in English. Typically, these students are coming towards the end of their studies, therefore, the main aim of the class is to prepare them for the English speaking workplace. However, before these students can access the workplace, they first need to navigate themselves around the English speaking jobs market.
A global job market
The university I work in is a provincial university, meaning many of the students live locally, and a majority plan on staying in the area to work after they have finished their studies. Despite the fact that many of the students will pursue German speaking careers, there are many international companies in the area where English is used, particularly IT and pharmaceutical companies. Therefore, I used the CV writing sessions as an opportunity to stress to the students that although they may choose to live and work locally, they will still be competing in a global job market.
English CV basics
Writing a CV in German is quite different to writing a CV in English, therefore, I began the class by having the students discuss CVs in general, for example:
- what the purpose of a CV is
- who writes a CV
- who reads a CV
- and most importantly, what information is included on a CV.
I then gave the students an example of an English CV and they discussed its content and layout in small groups. The example CV was of a recent business graduate with a similar profile to the students, and included the standard information you would expect to find on a CV, including the person’s contact details, education, work experience and skills. Together, the students discussed what different points showed to the potential employer reading the CV. For example, the candidate had mentioned on his CV that he was a member of a cricket team – at first the students thought this information was irrelevant, however, I explained to them that it is a good example to show that you can work well in a team.
This led to a discussion about what skills the students would need in their future careers, and if they had already acquired any of these skills through previous work experience they had done. We then spoke about finding work experience or an internship during the summer in order to try and acquire the skills they will need to have for future job applications.
The importance of tailoring
Having looked at an example CV in detail, we then analysed a job advertisement for the role of undergraduate course representative in the university. We went through the advert and decided what skills and work experience would be necessary for the role. The aim of this activity was to show the students that CVs should be tailored to a specific role or company and should not simply be a “blanket CV”. For homework, the students wrote a CV to apply to the role as course representative using a template I uploaded to Moodle, and they included the points we discussed in class.
I gave each student qualitative feedback on their CV, and as expected, the first time round many students had not tailored their CVs to the role of course representative, and simply listed ALL their experience and hobbies. This led to a lot of non-relevant information, including ‘I enjoy riding a bike’ and ‘going out with friends’, which of course, not only wastes space but also risks coming across negatively. This made for a good ‘teaching’ moment and for the next session I put together a CV using all the errors they had made. Together, we went through the CV and I elicited from the students why different parts were wrong or inappropriate. As we discussed the CV point by point, the students found their mistakes very amusing!
Something that was unfamiliar to the students was describing their work experience using bullet points and active verbs, they had also never written a short summary of their studies before. A typical mistake made by many students was the way they wrote dates on their CVs. For example, the usual format is “2017-present”, but many of the students wrote “since 2017” or simply “now”. Other common mistakes involved tense, for example jobs that have finished should be described using the past tense, as well as the overuse of capital letters, a typical mistake for German speakers as all nouns in German are capitalised. After receiving feedback and discussing the different mistakes in class, the students revised their CVs and submitted a final version which was assessed using a rubric.
Professional networking online
After writing CVs, I introduced the students to LinkedIn, a professional networking site, which surprisingly the majority of them had never heard of before. The students were shocked to hear that over 400 million people, including students, have a LinkedIn account. Today, most employers google candidates at the application stage, so of course, your search results are a good opportunity to sell yourself. I stressed to the students the importance of having a professional profile online, as well as making any personal profiles private. Simple advice, but I do not think you can take for granted what your students may or may not know as they begin their journeys into the world of work.