Common mistakes in resume and curriculum vitae

Common mistakes in resume and curriculum vitae

 “Resume is key, in your hand to open job door”

Once fresh under graduate enters his final year, he starts searching for internship and then job. For this purpose he writes resume and send it to employers. He faces following challenges:

What is difference between CV and Resume?

What are elements?

What is structure of CV / resume?

Is there any sequence in CV/resume?

What are dos and don’ts of CV / resume?

Majority of students also don’t know the difference between CV and Resume. Hence, forwarding same designed paper (CV or Resume) to all the places. Even they do not change or correct it once they are in professional job. This is because they do not know about above mentioned questions. In this article we will try to answer these and other confusions about this. 

Curriculum means course of life. While resume means summary of your academic and work history. It means that CV represents over all professional and academic details of person.

CV has following elements

Personal information:

This section contains full name, date of birth, contact information (email, phone numbers, and address), gender, father’s name, Passport or national ID card number.

Educational details:

Formal education with reverse chronological order i.e. highest degree on top, with passing year, GPA/grade/division obtained, institution name. mention major subjects for each degree, if applicable.

Job experience details

Work experience in reverse chronological order with service period (start and end date), summary of role and responsibilities, achievements obtained during job.

Certificates and accreditations:

Professional certifications done, affiliations and memberships of professional organizations and bodies.

Workshops and seminars:

Workshops and seminars attended or conducted either strengthen career or serving society with outline of workshop, venue, dates, participants attended.

Skills and expertise:

Skill is ability or talent to do task or work.  Mention skills in their respective category i.e. technical (sub category as per profession. e.g. analysis and design, object oriented programming are few examples of programming skills)

Research work:

Do mention any published or research work done in career with details. If its publish work mention year of publication and organization where it got published with web link or url.

Other information: mention as appropriate like organization found, volunteer work. Charity work. Show organizer.

Resume has following elements

Personal information: it only has name, contact information.

Educational details: mention undergraduate (bachelors) and above, degrees obtained in reverse chronological order with year of passing and grades scored.

Job experience: job title with role and responsibilities in reverse chronological order.

Skills and expertise: skills with their proficiency level and expertise with area or in tool.

Research work: published research work with summary and publication details.

Now, after understanding difference and elements of CV and resume, the question arises; when to use what? Send resume if it is not stated in advertisement of job. Normally CV is mentioned in the advertisement if required. Govt. and research organizations generally require CV and also ask photocopies of all relevant documents. 

Common mistakes done are:

Missing elements: missing means do not writing elements or incomplete details in any section make you qualify the dropout list.

Sequence: sequence of elements matters a lot. Use proper template and add information in logical sequence as per job requirements.

Over killing with too much details: writing detailed sentence just to over emphasize on any element.

Under killing with less details: only mentioning titles or headings. This also does not give any idea about your skills and expertise.

Contradictions: putting information that contradicts. e.g. mentioning graphics course while applying for network admin job.

Typo mistakes: spelling mistakes and punctuation errors.

Lack of focus: contents mentioned in cv/resume lack focus. Too many specialties, experience and expertise mentioned in way that lacks over all focus which may help for job.

General rules of thumb are stated to summarize the topic. 

CV and resume are projection of you. If it is complete, your image will also be complete and will make your path for job. And if it is incomplete, contradictory and others, it will not make you qualify for next level of hiring process. Remember CV is key, to open job door!