Towards the end of A levels or university, you’ll probably need to write a CV. It’s may well be the case that you haven’t got one that can simply be updated, and that’s okay. Once you get through the hard part of writing your first CV from scratch, you can hopefully just play around with it a bit in the future. There are a few tips to follow, and a few to avoid, when writing your CV.

Don’t let it work out to be an unrounded length; that is, make sure that any pages it contains are more or less completely filled, rather than using, say, one and a third pages. This looks unprofessional and highlights that you’ve not got further experience to fill up the second page. It’s much better to condense everything onto one page, or possibly play with margins and fill in a bit if you’re closer to the two page mark. There are always bits you can add in, like “references available upon request” or some of your personal interests.

Make sure your font is appropriate. This seems simple, but lots of people think using a ‘fancy’ font will make their CV stick out. It might, but probably not for the right reasons.

Don’t fill in every single detail of every single task you did in your previous experience so that your CV fills up 3-4 pages. Potential employers or universities don’t want to read a novel about how qualified you are and that you were in a drama club when you were 12. Keep things fairly to the point. What were the key skills and key tasks that you completed in each role? Write about those. You can further elaborate which qualities were particularly relevant to the job you’re applying for in a personal statement.

Make sure your spacing makes sense. Word processors can become really fiddly to use once you start introducing things like headers and bullet points, but it’s definitely worth persevering to get everything looking professional. You’ll find that achieving a good layout is much easier if you insert tables (this is assuming you’re starting from scratch) and make the table boundaries invisible. Using your spacing and tab keys is going to make any changes look very messy. Try using one of the CV templates if you can, although sometimes adapting these to your uses can be more complicated than just writing your own.

Lastly, show it to a careers advisor at your school or university. They can give you tips on what needs to be improved, what to add or what to get rid of. Once you have the outline of a good CV, you’ll just have to update it when you get some new experiences.