10 Essential Tips When Updating Your CV

10 Essential Tips When Updating Your CV. As we evolve in our careers, education and personal lives, there are thing that also need a bit of transformation. One of those things is your curriculum vitae. The following tips will help you on what to add, and what to omit as you update your CV.

1. Change Your Visual Style

Give your resume a style makeover. You can reuse some of the text you’ve already written, but now is a great time to develop a new layout and a new template. Choose a font, color palette, and visual theme that fits with your personal brand.

2. Revise Your Summary

People change and grow as time goes by, and career ambitions shift and evolve. Make sure your recent growth is reflected in your new resume summary.

3. Use a Professional Summary

Instead of a resume objective statement, utilize that space in your modern resume to provide a high-level overview of your career thus far. This allows you to pinpoint those qualifications and skills that make you different than other candidates.

4. Update The Formatting

Your resume doesn’t need to be visually arresting (unless you’re applying to be a designer or other art- or design-focused role). Still, design and formatting matter. Readability is important, that means using a standard font and plenty of white space.

5. Update Your Education Section

You previous degrees and training qualifications will stay the same, but you’ll want to add any new courses you’ve taken or certifications you’ve earned since your last stint on the market.

6. Don’t Date Your Education

If you graduated from college 15 or more years ago, there is no reason to include your graduation date on your resume. A recent college graduate may choose to do so simply because he or she doesn’t have any relevant professional experience at this point. However, for the rest of us, dating your education can cause age discrimination.

7. Update Your Work History

Since you now have more experience than you did when you drafted this earlier version, you’ll need to tighten the summary of your entire career timeline. Add your most position title, your employer’s name, and a bulleted list of your most important accomplishments in this role.

8. There Is No Need To Include All Jobs

There is no need to include that first job from 1985. Typically, resume writers will recommend only including the relevant past positions within the last 15 years of employment.

9. Update Your Skills

Have you increased your proficiency levels with specific software applications? Have you moved from basic competency to “expert levels”? Have you added new skills to your repertoire that you couldn’t claim in the past? Make sure each of these are represented before you re-launch your search.

10. Remove Personal Information

Many years ago, resumes potentially contained personal information such as marital status, number of children, and hobbies. Today, that type of information could become HR’s worst nightmare. There is no place for personal information on today’s modern resumes. Keep it professional at all times.