Part of our assignment requires us to design a CV, we’ve had a few classes on what makes a good CV such as the difference between an appropriate personal statement and a bad personal statement, the layout and the hierarchy of the information, some tips on what information to include and what matters in a CV.
We were given a few tools to help us along the way which could be found in folders on the Blackboard website. Personally I really found that the past years students CV examples gave me a good idea of what layout I was going to use, how to design the font and how to make everything tie together and look visually pleasing. Since most of these CVs had some colours, I decided I’d roll with my last name and the leaf logo I was wanting to create to design my CV in a few shades of a pale green colour, but I’m not so sure anymore that it looks professional and I’ll have to ask my tutor.
The other tool I found quite helpful was the Vmock CV AI tool, which you have 10 upload attempts from sign in and the AI will read through your CV, comparing it to other Ulster University CVs then highlight words and sections, telling you ways you can improve those sections like if there wasn’t enough impact in your wording or if you’ve used the same word too many times. I was happy with it in the start, but as it kept telling me to auto-fill to their CV template in order to make changes, I felt a bit fed up with not being able to change sections to what I wanted, and the biggest problem I felt was it didn’t allow me to write a personal statement, which is quite important in this work. To combat this, I read through the mistakes the AI was telling me about and went through my original word document, correcting words and fixing up my sentences so they fit the criteria better, and saved them both to compare with my tutor as I wasn’t sure which layout was more effective.
Reading through the PowerPoint slides, I noticed we were advised to first make a separate word document of all our experiences, relevant information and in the future, achievements which I obviously don’t have at the minute being in second year. I followed this advice and wrote down pretty much everything i thought I’d need so I could copy and paste things like my contacts, my strengths and software skills and experiences, rather than having to type them all out everytime I was altering my CV for this assignment. I wrote my first draft of my personal statement in this document too, changing it a few times after I pasted it into my CV and then again with the help of Vmock.
After having my tutorial with my tutor, I had all the questions i needed answered and made changes which can be found in my “feedback” post. Below is my finished CV.
