My CV sucked in second year:

In my Second year of university, I gave my student CV to a lad who had started a placement at a Big 4 firm. He emailed me, “This is a good student CV, but it isn’t going to work for grad schemes”. 

My format was too unorganised, my experience was too descriptive, and I had no social proof of leading professional projects or being accountable with other people’s money or time. Many university students find themselves in this position; they have always secured part-time and voluntary roles with a student CV, but struggle when it comes to making their CV more professional.

We have reviewed over 300 CVs and have more on the way. Most of them would likely secure a part-time job in a pub or retail setting, but breaking into graduate schemes, placements, and internships is significantly more challenging. The positive to this is that everyone starts here; everyone’s CV sucks at first.  Here are 3 things to watch out for to start moving from a student CV to a future professional.

Format matters:

There is a bit of a debate around the length of a CV, one page or two pages, maybe even 3 if you are a seasoned professional. Students are not seasoned professionals, and many won’t have a 2-page CV. They will either have a clean, crisp one-pager or the dreaded one-and-a-half-page CV, with the quality of content dropping significantly as they go further down that second page. A one and a bit page CV can take a strong applicant into dubious territory. It is therefore advisable to stick to one page.

Many formats exist for how to structure this one page, and CMD Careers provides a student template. Ideally, as a student, you want to cover three points in the following order. Education, Professional experience and either leadership and volunteering (less technical) or technical projects. Professional experience should be 50% of the CV, with 25% for education and leadership and volunteering / technical projects.

Education includes your course and degree classification (predicted or achieved), 3-5 relevant modules with % score in the following style “Introductory economics (72%)” and any societies or leadership positions you had a key role in. For example, “Head of finance society, coach of the football second team and president of investment group”. Students should lead their CV with education rather than professional experience because a university name and prestige are a massive differentiator for them and highlight their status as highly educated individuals.

Professional experience is a bit hard to define for students. My advice would be to consider anything that links to the career sector you want to work in as professional experience. As you gain more mature experience, we can swap these more basic roles out of the CV, as the CV should grow with you. In my second-year – third year CV, I included my pro-bono consulting work as “professional experience” alongside forage courses with Deloitte. There were unpaid experiences, but they were either directly working in strategy consulting with real companies or courses accredited by consulting firms. It is more important that you can draw actual value out of your experience than it is if the experience is “professional enough”.

Volunteering and leadership are where we expand society roles, group projects and other spaces of charity volunteering and leadership development. Focus on the value these roles have added rather than describing your job role. For example, instead of saying “In this role I led a team of staff to run a coffee and bake sale for X society”, say “Raised £3000 over a weekend by coordinating a cake and bake sale with 4 team members organising time budget, location and marketing.” Leadership skills can also draw on presentation experiences, working with professional clients and sports achievements. What you want to show a recruiter here is that you play well with others and have the confidence to lead when you need to.

We recommend using our template and seeing If you can fill all the sections in, if you can’t, you now have a clear visual indication of what to work on.

Experience should show impact and value:

Many students fall down when it comes to showing value. Their experience is descriptive, giving recruiters a very accurate detail of their role and responsibilities, but no context for scale of achievement, value add or time scales. Communicating impact and value goes beyond throwing metrics into a CV. These metrics need to be used strategically to clearly communicate the scale of the role, where you added clear value, and how consistent this contribution was.

This is the difference between “presented to stakeholders to show investment options for a stock portfolio” and “summarised investment options for a £15,000 stock portfolio via a presentation to senior bankers and client stakeholders every month”. Metrics add context to your achievements. We can then add value by linking these metrics to the outcome. For example, “summarised investment options for £15,000 stock portfolio via a presentation to senior bankers and client stakeholders every month, leading to a 30% increase in profits”. Now we have informed our performance with both metrics that provide context and a link to direct value.  If you have 3 bullet points like this, your CV will look a lot stronger. For example, in consulting it could look like this:

Presented new investment locations to the CEO and senior management of the local charity, identifying 3 key options providing an operational time save of 2 days.

Mentored 4 student consultants to design an investment strategy using geospatial data from open sources to quantify 20 locations across 5 key factors.

Secured £3000 in additional savings for our charity client via operational efficiencies, including email automation, social media scheduled posts and switching our marketing tool.

Use your university resources:

You will have course mates and friends who gain professional experience faster than you, professors who know friends who didn’t do a PhD and now work in a bank or marketing firm and a whole careers team. Use your university resources. Some of them will be out of date, so always cross-check. Despite this, career teams are still a good first step and far more students should introduce themselves and take advantage of this opportunity. If you have left university, check the rules on your university's careers support team, for example, at the University of Nottingham, the careers support is for life.

However, career advice and support via course mates and university professionals is only one type of university resource. What I mean by university resources is societies, hackathons, networks and student job opportunities. Check to see if your university is part of a group like Unitemps. This can be a great way to gain experience for your CV and get paid at the same time. Roles will start fairly generic, but Unitemps also offers research assistant roles, placements and professional projects. I think while at University, I earned around £50,000+ in 2 years, and maybe half of that was from Unitemps.

Societies are a fantastic way to network and show a career sector that you go beyond the average applicant. Please be aware that shallow participation societies gain value when you engage deeply. There is a world of difference between organising and presenting at a hackathon and watching in the audience. If you can’t be on the committee (and you probably can it isn’t that competitive for most societies), then be a member who actively supports and engages with the society beyond basic attendance and consumption.

Don’t pay for a CV review:

If someone is helping you 1-1 rewrite or reconfigure your CV, maybe that makes sense to pay for that person’s time, but do not pay for someone to just read through your CV. Many, many groups, including CMD Careers, will give you a comprehensive review for free. If we are too backlogged (we run a small team, and the service is very popular), we will ask you if you want recommendations on other free services to review your CV.

Don’t pay for a CV review. This student support space is becoming very lucrative, and people are taking advantage of students’ confusion and desperation. Don’t let that be you, and I’d urge you not to support the people doing that.