Do:

• Be specific about your skills and experience.
• Put your main selling point first.
• Keep it punchy and as factual as possible.
• Mention what you enjoy doing.
• Make sure that the rest of your CV backs up everything you say in your personal profile.
• Include something about your character and nature only if it is believable and important to the CV.

Do not:

• Use flowery, meaningless, exaggerated or long descriptions of your skills and abilities.
• Use more than two adjectives in one sentence to describe yourself or your abilities.
• Use clichéd phrases.

The first few lines of your CV should include a profile of your key skills, abilities and  experience. Something about your career objectives may also be appropriate. Be careful here, if you can catch the potential employer's eye with the profile he will go on to read the rest of the CV with close attention. If you can't he will just skim the rest of the CV and may not even read it all.

 Any major qualifications (e.g., B.Sc.) can be included after your name at the top of the page, before the profile.

What to Include in your Personal Profile.

Personal profile example 1

Personal profile example 2

 Think about the specific qualifications, skills and experience you have which are relevant to the job you are applying for, or which are your major selling points, and use these to build up your profile. Put your main selling point first so that it will catch the assessor's eye.

Avoid flowery and meaningless or exaggerated descriptions of your skills in the profile and try to be as specific as possible. Use very favourable descriptions only if they can be backed up by information elsewhere in the CV. For instance, if you say in your profile that you have a "wealth of experience of growing tomatoes", your CV should somewhere show how much experience you have. Personally I would avoid the "wealth" and say "27 years experience of growing tomatoes". After all, for some people 3 years is a wealth of experience, whereas for others it's 23.

 If you think you have personal characteristics (eg enthusiasm or patience) which are particularly important include them here, but do not overdo it. Long descriptions in your CV of what  a great person you are will cause 'glassy eye' syndrome in an employer very quickly.

Use a maximum of two words to describe what sort of person you are. "Bright and enthusiastic graduate" paints a believable picture. "Bright, enthusiastic, highly motivated, hard working and conscientious graduate" will get ignored. 

In general minimise descriptions of personal characteristics and concentrate on the facts. In order to focus attention on the most important facts the "bullet point" style is generally best. One lengthy paragraph may well get skipped over.

Read more about the kind of language to use in describing yourself.

It can also help to include something about what you enjoy doing and what you think you are good at, e.g., for a Safety Officer, "particularly enjoy field inspection work" gives the impression of a very different person to someone who says "particularly enjoy calculation and compilation of safety statistics". Be careful here though, you can easily rule yourself out of a lot of jobs.

 There are a number of phrases which are so meaningless or clichéd and overused in CVs that they will be ignored. They include "highly motivated", "good team player", "excellent communication skills" and "highly professional". Replace these phrases with something much more specific. 

Personal Profile Example 1. 

You want to apply for a job as an electrical engineer on a hydro electric power plant in Chile, but you don't know much else about the job. You hope it's in a supervisory position.

 You are a chartered electrical engineer.You spent a couple of years doing casual work in Chile after you graduated, and you worked for a few weeks on 3 different hydro-electric power plants in Scotland. You are also qualified to work on a particular type of equipment found in some hydro-electric plants. However, you have spent almost all your career working at a milk bottling plant in England. What you really like to do is detailed design work and you consider yourself a particularly hard worker.

 The profile could be built up like this:  

Hard working chartered electrical engineer with 13 years experience.

• Experience on 3 different hydro-electric power plants.
• 2 years work experience in Chile.
• Qualified to standard 3921 for work on hydro-electric gizmo type xyz.
• Team leadership experience.
• Completed electrical commissioning of a milk bottling plant in only three weeks.
• Enthusiastic modifications designer. Particularly enjoy detailed design work. 

 In this example you would of course have to mention somewhere in your CV what team you have led. You would have to be careful with the last point as well. People who are enthusiastic about one aspect of a job sometimes are unwilling to do the rest of it!

 Personal Profile Example 2.

  As in the rest of your CV, the profile should be as specific as possible about your skills. Here is a profile I do not like:

 "Highly qualified and vastly experienced environmental scientist. Author of numerous peer reviewed scientific papers on important environmental topics. Excellent team player and superb communicator. Adopt a detailed and rigorous analytical approach to the solution of intractable problems and develop highly effective solutions. Well proven ability to successfully manage complex research projects to the very highest standard".

 When reading this paragraph my eyes glaze over after about line three. It has little credibility. It also leads to many unanswered questions, e.g., how many scientific papers?; what kind of problems?; what kind of research projects?

 Substituting facts for descriptions, eliminating some of the excesses and changing the format, a better version would be:

 "PhD environmental scientist with 20 years experience.

•  Published 17 scientific papers on Global Warming.
•  Presented research results at more than 20 conferences.
•  Managed the Grey Skies $30M international research project within budget and to a successful conclusion.
•  I enjoy teamwork and have highly developed leadership and presentation skills.
•  I specialise in approaching intractable academic problems with an analytical approach and have a record of developing effective solutions."

This version gives far more information, is more credible and should stimulate the reviewer to read on and find out more about the candidate- or to find out more during an interview. You should of course give examples of your record of developing effective solutions later in the CV.