It commonly referred to as CV, is a longer, more detailed synopsis than a resume. It includes a summary of your educational and academic background, as well as teaching and research experience, publications, presentations, awards, honors, affiliations, and other details.
Summary: The summary should be short and sweet, no more than four or five lines of text and should highlight your key skills and attributes. This should portray a highly favourable picture of you and indicate your strengths which are relevant to the position you are applying for. Your summary, however, must be completely truthful
Major Achievements: After the summary you should list three to six major achievements that are directly related to the job you are applying for. It is important to pick achievements that are relevant as this shows that you have understood what the recruiter is looking for.
If possible you should mention facts and figures, although you may feel that these are confidential and you may not want to disclose them. They do however make the CV more interesting and give the recruiter a better idea of your capabilities.
Work Experience: Your work experience should come next and should describe your responsibilities, skills attained and achievements in each position that you have had. This should always be in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent position and working backwards from there. You should concentrate on your two most recent jobs, unless these are not relevant to the position you are applying for or you were only in these positions for a short time. Mention budgetary responsibilities, number of staff managed (if applicable) and try and give a good picture of where you fitted into the organisation and what interactions you had with other companies and departments.
Education / Qualifications: Provide details of your educational qualifications in this section.If your educational achievements are not so excellent, then you should not waste too much space on it, because your work experience will be far more important to the recruiter. It goes without saying that you must actually have all the qualifications you have claimed for yourself.
IT Skills / Training / Other Skills: You should list your up-to-date IT skills, training and other skills (such as language skills and typing speeds if relevant). For IT skills you may want to include hardware (PCs, Macs), operating systems (Windows 95/98) and applications (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
Personal Details: This should include your date of birth and age, marital status (optional) and nationality (optional).
Hobbies/Interests: Hobbies and interests are generally not considered very important on a CV. However they may be able to tell a recruiter a lot about your personality, leadership potential and team working skills. So they should not be overlooked completely.
References: References do not generally needed to be included on a CV unless specifically asked for.
