Further education is not for everyone and very often people like to leave school or college and get straight into work. Lots of work experience is often favoured by employers but they will understand that this won’t be possible for a young adult who has just come out of full-time education so they will be looking for other attributes you may possess.
Demonstrating your skills and personality through your CV and covering letter is the best way to grasp a potential employer’s interest, and it is an excellent skill to have for use in your working life also. Chances are, you have not written a detailed CV whilst at school or college, so we have shared a basic CV structure and come up with 3 top tips to help you promote yourself and secure a role in the culinary industry.
How to Structure Your CV
Introduce Yourself
Write a short summary about yourself to give the employer a feel for what type of person you are and the goals you are looking to achieve in your career. This should be a few lines long and will act as a mini personal statement.
Show Your Qualifications
Use this section to share your qualifications in education, work or extra-curricular activities. For academic qualifications, should put the most recent at the top (for example, A-Levels, then GCSEs). If you have any culinary qualifications, be sure to add those here also.
Summarise Your Education
You will need to say where you studied at school/college and give a brief description of the things that stand out to you and things that could help you in obtaining the job (such as team building activities, prefect responsibilities, etc.)
Include Work Experience
If you’ve ever done work experience, whether that be organised through the school or sourced by yourself, remember to include that here. Also, if you have a part-time job, you can write about that here too. Like with your education, remember to summarise your key responsibilities and any skills you learnt.
Share Your Skills
If you have any particular skills which you think would benefit your application to a certain role, you should include those here. Don’t be modest about your capabilities either, be proud of what you can do!
Give References
You will need to share at least 2 valid references from people who know your character and work ethic. Teachers, work experience supervisors or previous employers are the sorts of people you would need for this. Try not to have people that are too similar (2 people from your past job) and remember to get permission first!
3 Top Tips for Writing a CV
So now you’ve got a basic structure, here are 3 top tips to give your CV a little extra boost:
- Draw on Your Experiences
When applying for jobs, you need to think about how what you’ve already done will benefit you in your working life, and particularly in this role. Your CV should not look the same as everyone else’s because your experiences will be different from theirs. Just keep it interesting and true to yourself and you’ll find that employers will be much more interested in your application.
- Don’t Ramble
Try and avoid the wording on your CV being too lengthy as it could look crowded and may discourage people to read it. You need to go for quality over quantity and make sure that the information you have down is informative and detailed, and it fits on less than 2 pages!
- Remember to Proof-read!!
Typos and grammar errors are not professional so make sure that you double check your CV before you send it out to any potential employers. You could also ask someone you know to read over it before you send it out as a fresh pair of eyes may be able to spot something that you’re missing.
