CV Writing

I’ve been working on my CV quite a lot lately. I have a geoscience CV, and a generic part time work CV. I then read an article about infographics, and how standard, tabulated, bullet pointed, listy type CV’s are old skool, and just, well, rubbish.

I signed up to make my CV into an infographic – the site is http://vizualize.me/ and you can sign in with your Linked In account, so I did. It lifted the info from my Linked In, and then I could play about with colours, layout, style etc. It’s still in beta mode – but there’s so much potential!! This could be a really, really good site in the future when it’s been fully developed.

I really like the alternate CV I made. You can hover over the words to read more, so it looks quite empty (but also uncluttered & tidy), but when you scroll over the words you can read all about me! (yay!) It even allowed me to put a map on, with my three languages, and it features a key to show my proficiency in said languages. You can see my CV here: http://vizualize.me/hamiltonlaura

Then, as I was eating my nommy beef stew that I made two months ago, I decided on a completely new CV idea. It takes all the elements from my boring, standard, bullet pointed, listy CV, and combines it with bold, coloured, LOOKATME boxes. It’s only one page of A4, and it doesn’t contain the blurbs of my academic achievements like my standard CV, nor does it even list any results or awards I’ve gained. It DOES however (I think!) grab your attention, it makes you look, it has my work history, it has my education history, it has a link to my Linked In profile (where all of this, and more, information is available for anyone to see), and I quite like it! It needs work – I think I need more emphasis on geology-related stuff that I’ve done at uni, projects I’ve worked on, what I’ve learnt from being on the LapSoc Committee etc.

Maybe I could turn this into my part time work CV: attention grabbing, HIRE ME! CV. It’s a start anyway. It’s certainly opened my eyes to a whole new world of CV writing, and I hope a potential employer out there thinks the same. It certainly shows I’ve looked at it from a different angle, and it demonstrates my ICT skills as it’s me who’s made it. The only way to find out is to try I suppose.. (You can see it below - opinions most welcome!)

L x