Factual and Accurate CVs - Achievements/Skills in CVs.

Do:

Identify clear achievements, even if they were only a small part of your job.
Take a structured approach to identifying achievements and skills.
Identify achievements in your private life if you have lttle work experience.
Be as specific as you can in listing your skills.
Mention all skills which could feasibly be relevant

Do not:

List your previous employer's projects and achievements without specifying the role you played in them.

Achievements in CVs.

Any achievements in particular jobs should be highlighted in your career history. For some people this is quite easy. If you were given a difficult specific task to carry out and did so within budget then the achievement is easily identified.

Think particularly about achievements that can be quantified in some way, eg you exceeded sales objectives by 20% or carried out some task in a month less than anyone else. Think hard about each job you have done and any task you were particularly pleased about. It may only have been a small element of your job but it will still look good on your CV.

What if I Don't Have any Achievements?

You almost certainly have! For some jobs achievements are hard to identify, although you may well have been doing the job extremely well. Remember that achievements are not just about successfully completing particular tasks. They might also be about achieving continuity, avoiding problems, or maintaining production.

For instance, if you were the Manager of an office with 30 young staff doing routine jobs, just the daily chores of sorting out personnel problems, recruiting staff and keeping the office running might seem like a steady job with no particular achievements.

You should not be too modest though, your type of achievement is just different to other people's. How about "maintained steady work output for 5 years from an office of 30 young staff".

A good way to identify achievements is to think through each job you have done and apply some key words to each, e.g., objective achieved, objective exceeded, problem overcome, new idea, difficult continuity, new practice, high quality work, project completed. For your particular job, different key words may be appropriate, so first think about which key words to use. You can then write out a small memory prompt table like the one below and you will find you can put something in at least some of the cells.

	Objective achieved.	Project completed.	Problem Overcome.	New Idea.
Sales Manager, British Widgets, 2006-present.	Increased year on year sales by >10% for two years.	Opened new office in Inverness.
Sales Assistant, French Gizmos, 2003-2006.			Became fluent in French in 18 months.
Sales Assistant, London Toy Co, 2001-2003.				Proposed new tracking system, which was accepted and implemented.

If you do not yet have any work experience, or not much, it is valid to mention particular achievements in your leisure time or during your education. These could include achievements in sport, in social organisations, pursuit of interests or during educational projects. Be sensible though. Organising a successful expedition for 15 people to the Amazonian rain forests is an achievement; training yourself to drink 10 pints of lager a night isn't!

It's your Achievements, not your Previous Company's Achievements.

Remember your CV is about your skills and achievements, not the achievements of the company you used to work for. Avoid long lists of successful projects or team tasks which you have been involved with, unless you specify the role you played in the team.

The fact that your last company built fifteen power stations in South Africa, designed the world's tallest building and sold a million tonnes of ice to Eskimos is really not of great interest to your next employer. What he wants to know is what role you played in those achievements and how did you contribute to the success?

If you say you were "responsible for all cost benefit calculations used in the successful sale of snow to Eskimos" it's much more impressive and informative than just saying you were part of the team.

Skills in CVs.

Is your CV a general recommendation of what a good person you are or does it specifically list the skills you have? Is the information in it as accurate as possible- or is it full of hyperbole and general language?

An instance. Does it say you are a good team player? Probably, we all say that - but does it specifically state what skills you would bring to the team? If you just mean you like to be part of a team, well, don't we all!

Be Systematic in Identifying your Skills.

Think in turn about each aspect of your last couple of jobs and identify what skills you used in them. For instance, almost all jobs require some IT skills. Don't just say "Good IT skills". Specify which software programmes you can use with any competence,e.g., MS Word, Powerpoint etc. Or if your job involves more specialist IT skills specify, for instance, which programming languages or software packages you can use.

Distinguish between skills at which you are just competent and those at which you are an expert. If you claim you are expert at everything you probably won't be believed, but if you say you are competent at a couple of things but expert at something else, you probably will be - but be prepared to prove it.

Similarly with other aspects of your job, think specifically of the skills you have and try to define them and how good you are at them. Are you an Environmental Scientist? Don't just say you are competent with environmental modeling techniques, specify whether your speciality is groundwater, atmospheric or water modeling. Which particular modeling packages have you used?

If you have some specialist skills which you believe will not be relevant to the job you are applying for, mention them briefly anyway. You can never be certain which skills will be useful to the employer.