Success profiles: candidate guide

Your CV

Your CV is a document that allows you to summarise your education, work history, technical skills and your experience. Your CV will be assessed against the Success Profile criteria in the job advert so make sure the information you provide is relevant to the job.

Formatting your CV

There is no set template CVs must follow, and you will not be scored on the design your CV, however you should make sure that the content of your CV is presented clearly.

What your CV should include

Your work history can include relevant paid work, volunteering work and/or work experience through school or college. You can also mention experience you have from other environments. For example, if you helped organise a school trip or arranged a charity event you can highlight the skills you used.

Your CV does not need to be a full history of all your work and education — it’s fine to leave out or summarise things that are not relevant to the role. For example, it is not important to include school information where your more recent experiences provide more evidence against the criteria.

Tips for writing your CV

• be concise: keep your CV to around 2 pages
• tailor your CV: the criteria for the position will be published in the job advert, use this to decide what information to include in your CV
• include qualifications where relevant:  your education or qualifications only need to be included where they are detailed in the criteria, or if they provide relevant evidence for the panel
• include key skills and knowledge: you should provide information on skills or areas of knowledge relating to the role, such as operation of specific tools, software or knowledge of specialist topics
• list your previous roles: provide this in chronological order starting with the most recent, include specific achievements from each role along with key responsibilities
• be specific: avoid using too many generic descriptions for example ‘delivered various projects’, instead, provide specific examples and quantify your achievements
• give context: provide the panel with some context to understand your work, for example, Project Manager is a commonly used job title that will mean different things in different industries, provide a short explanation of the role as well as your achievements in that role
• link your achievements to roles: it is easier for a panel to understand your achievements when linked to a specific role - an achievements section is difficult to understand for panels without the context of when the achievements were made