Don’t be shy to brag on your CV

Most people are too shy to brag about what they’ve done and they end up with an average CV. The trick to making your CV amazing is to hype up what you’ve done. Tell them how amazing you really are without lying!

You can do this by using action words in your CV, for example, ‘I achieved first place in…’ Or, ‘I qualified with honours…’, or ‘I raised over a million rand in funds…’

Here are some questions you can jot down the answers to, using action words to help you create an AWESOME CV!

1. Were you captain, leader, head of anything during school or university?
2. Did you win any significant awards?
3. What were your marks like in comparison to others, eg. I scored in the top 100 students in the country in my final year of Engineering.
4. Were you chosen for any special teams, assignments, competitions?
5. Were any of your research or papers adopted by institutions or companies?
6. Did you save your previous employers significant costs?
7. Did you exceed your targets at previous employers?
8. Did you improve the status-quo of business at your previous companies?
9. Did you mentor anyone, or were you mentored by someone well-known in the industry?
10. Did you spend any significant amount of time in another country?

Once you have included the answers to these questions, your CV starts to become interesting to the recruiter.

You can do all this and keep your CV to a maximum of two pages, which is the recommended length.

Once you’ve typed your CV, give it to someone in business, like your parents or a lecturer. Let them poke holes in it and critique it. Then go back and refine your CV by editing it.

Your CV is worth spending some time on because once you have the format right, it will work for you for the rest of your career. You just have to keep updating it – using the same principles.

Also remember to apply these same principles to your LinkedIn account, any personal website you’ve created and any other application you complete.

You’ll stand out from the rest of the crowd by a mile!