CV Considerations
Stay relevant.
What worked for you 2 years ago will not work for you today and who you were 2 years ago has most definitely evolved, so your materials should reflect that too.
What YOU want.
You will never be able to appeal to every reader and neither should you!
- Be clear about your skills and strengths to date… but most of all, what duties/tasks/projects/stages do you REALLY enjoy about your current job?
- Present evidence backed experience you have.
- Who’s the personality behind it all?!
People buy into people and the only way to stand out is to inject your own tone of voice and vibrancy into the documentation you present.
So, first and foremost, be clear in your journey, where you’ve been, what you have to offer but most of all what you enjoy doing!!
We encourage you to turn off your phone, tv, and any other distractions and sit in a quiet space to evaluate your current job:
- What don’t you like or even hate about your current role? This may form in the way of duties, environment, reasons for moving, people, managerial styles, how you’re treated, etc.
- What do you LOVE about your job? We really want you to delve deep here. If you’re in the architectural or design industry, it’s probably taken you very many years to get to qualification stage and you may still be in it. So, it’s great to recognise why you came into the industry in the first place and reignite those aspirational feelings so you can take stock of the whys and how’s… then move forward with the reinvigoration of what you want your future day-to-day life to feel and look like!
No one is looking for a robot, so use your creative licence to be you… creative! We want to read your CV and gain a window into who you are as a person, so we understand you as an individual, which is so impactful in the hiring process!
Personal brand.
I’m sure you’ve read this a million times on social media, but your biggest selling point is you. Ultimately, people buy into people who have similar characteristics to their own, by that we mean…. The hiring manager who will hire you will see similar attributes or characteristics they recognise in themselves in the earlier stages in their own career… we’ll delve deeper into this when you get to the interview stage.
For now, we really encourage you to use your creative licence and your design creativity to think about who you are and how to articulate/demonstrate that, in the context of your CV.
Firstly, explore commercial brands, like Apple, Nike, Prada or whatever big brands appeal to you…. this is just for point of reference so that you can gain an understanding of what a “brand” is about.
Once you’ve done that, we’ll help you to hone it down to what YOU are about.
We’re using big, branded names outside of architecture and design to give you an insight into how they represent themselves.
Each of those brands have very different fonts, colours, text placement which all evoke a very different feel about who they are as a brand/company…. As well as who they’re trying to attract.
So should you too! How you present yourself and your own “personal brand” should be reflected in your own CV and portfolio. Text, white space, image use, the methodical manner you go about a design project should be demonstrated within the documents you present to AE Recruitment and the person who’s going to hire you!
Think long and hard about colours and fonts….. believe it or not, there are university courses on these subjects, but to get to the point, here’s a couple of links to help:
- Colours – it will give you an insight into the psychology of colours and the emotions they evoke
- Fonts – again they have subliminal meanings too. Once you understand you’ll note which fonts big brands use, and why.
As you work in a visual industry it’s important to recognise that look, feel, tone, colours and fonts all culminate to form an opinion of who you are to a hiring manager, especially in a design based job.
Showing off your presentation skills as well as your work and the stages of a construction project you work on all help to communicate your suitability for the job you are applying to.
By reducing the list of question marks in your materials, you increase your chances of being selected for an interview.