Writing your CV
Creating a compelling CV or resume as an architect or designer is crucial for showcasing your skills, experiences and personal brand, while simultaneously subliminally demonstrating your value and worth to a potential hiring manager/employer.
AE Recruitment has first-hand experience just how impactful the initial first impression can make!
Your CV is a marketing tool that represents your professional persona. It should succinctly present your qualifications, experience, and skill to potential employers helping them see how you align with their needs.. and yours!
How many pages?!
We remember being at school, back in the day, when our tutors were telling us to “be clear, be concise and get to the point within 2 pages!”. AE Recruitment management team were certainly taught that at school, back in 1997!!!! Please don’t fall into a trap of thinking you should follow those antiquated views too!
The job seeking/recruitment landscape has massively changed since “AE Recruitment” was born in 2007, so release the shackles of the CV page number misinformation conformity and feel free to run into 10 pages if you need to… just be more conscious of how your CV is laid out, how you present your background and make your point by demonstrating your background/experience.
We have created very basic CV Templates for you which you’ll find in the coming modules.
All our templates serve as an invaluable exercise to make you think about your own original content. We encourage you to use the first page as a quick “snap shot” of what’s important to you for your next position. Then the following pages are for you to develop further!
Design.
A professional and visually appealing cover page that includes your:
- Name and contact information
- Career summary.
- Education
- Professional affiliations.
- Awards and recognitions.
- Computer software experience
- Work experience. Projects – name of project, sector, dates, size and scale of projects, your involvement, who you reported to and who reported into you, , what stages you worked on, the challenges you faced and how you overcame them.
- References (optional)
Career summary.
A career summary holds so much power and belief in an individual, so choose your words carefully, there’s a lot of importance in those first few lines of text to grab a hiring manager’s attention! We say this cautiously, only because we read so many career summaries that are exactly-the-same [hands on face emoji]… Go for it, tell your audience who you are, what you have to offer, figures and statistics of how you’ve benefitted your recent employers.. or explain in your own words why you got into the industry and what you love about your work. Depending on your seniority and type of role you’re in, whether it’s more technical or design based, your summary is a window into who you are as an individual regardless and what it would be like if the hiring manager were to offer you a job. Remember, you’re in a design based industry, you’re all visual people so give the reader an insight what it would be like to work with you from a personal perspective!
Layout.
Ok, so we could talk for days/weeks about layout… if you’re struggling, go through the CV templates in the next module.
Refer to your personal brand and what you represent as an individual but don’t fall into a trap of being the same as everyone else! You’re in a design-based industry so be serious about how cohesive in your materials (CV and Portfolio) should look and feel. This means consistency is key!
In terms of the order of your experience….. It must, must, must be in a chronological order or reverse chronological order. By that, we mean start with your most recent employment and work your way backwards throughout your career history.
There’s an essential reason why!!!!
Hiring managers are super busy people… hence why they engage companies like AE Recruitment to do their hiring for them! They have a day-to-day job to do and reading CVs isn’t their passion in life…. Designing spaces are!
So, with that in mind, they’ll open your CV and if your opening page doesn’t “grab their attention”, it’s really hard for us (AE Recruitment or any other recruitment consultancy) to make them read your CV again.
Your first page is the most important! So, Career Summary, Education, Computer skills are what sparks their interest first off. They then don’t have time to be scrolling up and down your document to figure out dates of where you worked when. If your experience starts with “Architectural Assistant”, when they’re looking for a “Senior Architect”, chances are, they’ve moved onto the next candidate/job seeker we’ve sent.
Conclusion: give the hiring manager what they’re looking for as quickly as possible to spark their interest and then give them a great experience which is really easy to read so you never get overlooked.
Takeaway: chronological order, starting with most current employment and work your way back! I know we’ve overemphasised here, but we can’t stress how important it is!
Projects.
Include a selection of your best work/projects that are relevant to the job you are applying to. By selecting projects that are relevant to the job you are applying to, you will keep the hiring manager focused on what is important to their vacancy and will also give you an indication of your suitability by the volume of projects you have in a certain sector. Whether that’s residential, commercial, high-rise, transportation, aviation, etc.
Under each company you worked for list each project, provide a description that explains the context, challenges, design concept/technical/site/managerial and your specific duties and responsibilities. Use images, sketches, renderings, construction drawings and diagrams within your portfolio to illustrate your ideas and design process that coincide with what you detail within the body of your CV
Include the scale, size, and value of projects as well as the height if you work on high-rise projects.
Project stages.
The most confusing part of the selection process is deciphering an individual’s interpretation of the singular word, “design.” This is also why hiring managers request a portfolio of work so they can understand what phase of the project you work on, involvement, capability, and suitability against their requirement.
Whichever stages of the project you work on defining those stages, either text based or via visuals is a key part of the selection process and clearly explains the breadth of your involvement on each project.
Here is a rough guide to help you:
- Pre-Design Phase (0-1 stages) – preconcept/feasibilities/strategic definition/inception
- Design (as a broad term but they include stages 2-4) – concept design/feasibility/preliminary design/schematic design/concept & viability/AGR stage which then runs into the more technical stages of 3d modelling/technical design/detailed design/design development/construction documents/contract documentation and tender.
- Construction (stage 5) – construction
- Handover (stage 6) – project close/handover/close out
Here is the full list of clearly defined RIBA stages, which vary for various architectural associations around the globe:
- Stage 0 – Strategic Definition
- Stage 1 – Preparation and Briefing
- Stage 2 – Concept Design
- Stage 3 – Spatial Coordination
- Stage 4 – Technical Design
- Stage 5 – Manufacturing and Construction
- Stage 6 – Handover
- Stage 7 – Use
Success rate.
Ultimately, the amount of work you put in “right now” will have a domino effect into how successful you’re able to secure interviews. The CV writing process is your ticket to understanding yourself, what you have to offer, where you want to go in your career and will also prepare you for questions that you’ll be faced with in the interview stages of your job seeking process.
Here’s a guide with your job seeking process and what to focus on if you have not secured the job you want:
- Applications but no Interviews.
You’re either applying to the wrong jobs or you haven’t effectively communicated your experience against the job you’re applying to.
TO DO – rewrite your CV and think about who you are as an individual, have an emphasis on the projects you’ve worked on and be effective in communicating your experience against the jobs you’re applying for. - Interviews but no offers (offers = a job offer of employment in writing from a company after salary negotiations).
You’ve successfully won the interest of hiring managers but there’s been a miscommunication within the body of your CV against the job you’ve applied to OR there’s a misfit personality/expertise wise, with the job you originally applied to.
TO DO – Rewriting your CV is usually the answer because there’s a mismatch with what you’ve communicated in your CV, which is usually to do with your skillset against their perceived expectation of you… OR there’s a personality/value/moral mismatch. Probability wise, the forma is usually the case. If you think there truly is a personality mismatch, inject your personality into your CV. - Job offers (offers = a job offer of employment in writing from a company after salary negotiations) but you don’t accept.
This stage is more complex as there are a plethora of reasonings behind this, however, if you are in this position where the job role or salary isn’t aligned with where you want to go in your career, and you have a realistic salary expectation, then you haven’t demonstrated your value or expertise in line with the position you applied to.
TO DO – Rewrite your CV so that you communicate your experience, morals and values in a way that showcases/demonstrates your value/worth within your CV and Portfolio that’s more convincing.
Conclusion: Outsourcing your CV writing will NOT be your winning ticket to securing the job you’re looking for. However, understanding yourself, your expertise and how your able to communicate your experience WILL!
Not every company will be right for you and neither will you want to work for every company either. So, again, if you are finding yourself in circumstances at interview stage where you’re thinking that the company’s ethos, ethics or otherwise don’t align with who you are…. rewrite your CV so that readers have a clear understanding of who you are and what you’re about.
Personal branding and understanding how to market yourself will only ever be a positive in your career so dedicating days, weeks and even months will only benefit youyou’re your career in the long term!