Sitting at home

[venta]

This entry is very dull, I just need to record some stuff somewhere.

It's now two weeks since I've been in work - the week before the company folded we'd been sent home by the Administrators while they counted things and archived hard drives. Two weeks off work is nearly half my annual holiday allowance, so that'd be, like, loads of free time. So I can do all those things like tidying my room that never quite happen, yeah ? Well, no, I seem to have been really busy. So I feel I ought to keep track of what I'm going with my time before it all slides away from me.

Week 1
Mon-Tues: sitting at home trying to write a CV. Deeply unpleasant experience. Ended up with a first draft.
Wed: Early morning meeting at work, employees decamped en masse and spent the rest of the day in the pub.
Thurs: Helped Frances make banners. Painted a flag to take to Glastonbury (which reminds me, must sew it up and find a flagpole).
Fri: Travelling to the Lake District.

Week 2
Mon: AM - filling in redundancy forms at work. PM - futile trip to jocentre.
Tues: AM - on phone and on hold to jobcentre and various other people who want to know I'm out of work. PM - Reading a write-your-CV book and applying for BCS membership.
Wed: Rewriting of CV in accordance with feedback from various sources. Much gnashing of teeth.
Thurs: AM - Further CV rewriting. PM - sold textbooks to Blackwells, made quiche/cake/brownies.

Comments

[pm215]

Yes, I've been finding CV writing pretty soul-destroying stuff (indeed, I'm reading LJ rather than working on it right now...)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, soul-destroying has been my adjective of choice as well. I now feel like I've hammered out something I'm happy with, but sadly several people seem to be strongly of the opinion that it ought to be more challenges-I-faced-and-problems-I-overcame orientated, with snappy personal statements at the top and the like.

Trying to compromise between a CV which will get me an interview and a Cv I don't hate myself for writing :)

[pm215]

Yes, I've been doing a personal-statement kind of layout, along the lines suggested in this handy CV writing workshop page.

On the subject of adjectives, I rather like 'intricate' which is one that uitlander suggested as part of the rephrasing of the personal profile bit at the top of my CV.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Challenges-faced-and-problems-overcome would deprive interviewers of one of their favourite interview questions, though!

I do projects-of-note instead.

[uitlander]

Its a horrible thing to have to construct from scratch. I said to pm215 that once I had a working version of mine, I've updated it every three months or so (thank you staff development session at Newcastle Uni for that suggestion). It proved useful. I have a master word document that is about 10 pages long with everything I can think of in it, and now when I apply for jobs I cut n'paste the relevant bits into a fresh word document.

I'm sorry to have added to the confusion - I know its a right pain in the backside going through all of this, but it is worth it.

Something to watch out for is that word preserves metadata about track changes/edits, even when you haven't turned that feature on. In Word 2003 onwards, a security setting is turned on by default which will open a word doc with any metadata showing track changes automatically turned on. This means people will see what looks like a dog's breakfast with multiple edit histories if they have the default word setup on their PC. Cutting and pasting loses all the crud, and having learnt this I always cut n'paste my CV into a fresh doc before sending it off for jobs. Thanks M$, nice one.

Additionally, format your contact info at the top in such a way that recruitment agent can safely butcher it (they want to keep it secret) without wrecking the layout of the rest of the CV. It actually worth asking them what they do to modify a CV before sending it onto a prospective employer (they usually stick their company name and logo on it, and ruin your page breaks). Also always take an original print out of the CV you submitted to an interview - in the worse case scenario you can say 'well this is what I sent them'. (I've had tech author interviews where they tell me my CV looks awful, and this has always been due to butchering by agents)