British English

Job Skills: Prepare your English CV for a job in the UK

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• published: 12 Aug 2015
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Moving to or living in the UK? Looking to apply for work? You will need to prepare your British English CV. A CV is also known as a resume. Did you know that in the UK, we have our own way of making CVs that is different from what is commonly done in other European countries? A British CV is closer in format and structure to an American CV. In this lesson, you will learn what to include and what not to include in your curriculum vitae. Also, I will teach you some impressive vocabulary and phrases for your CV that will help you land that interview and achieve your goals. It's not easy to find employment, but with the right skills, you have a better chance of getting the job you want! Take a quiz on this lesson here: http://www.engvid.com/job-skills-uk-cv/ TRANSCRIPT Hello, everyone. I'm Jade. What we're talking about today is your British English CV. Maybe you want to put together your first British English CV to apply for jobs in the UK. So in this video, I'm going to tell you what's standard, and I'll tell you a little bit about it, so that you can create your first or an improved British English CV. So what we're going to talk about first is the format of your CV. Because we... There's not like one CV that's... Everybody does. There are conventions, there are set ways of doing it, but within that, there is some leeway; you can do different things. And this is important when we think about format, because it really depends what experience you have, which format you're going to choose, because you want to use your CV to sell yourself. So if you've got a lot of experience behind you, then you want to do a chronological CV, with your most recent job and then going backwards. We usually have the most detail... Or no, we do. We have the most detail for the most recent or current job, and then after that, the previous job, some detail as well. But generally after that, we don't really say much about the jobs that far in the past. And that's the key difference that I've seen on many CVs when I'm looking at CVs from people from Italy or Spain or wherever. They usually have a lot of detail for past jobs that were quite a long time ago, whereas we don't really say so much about things that were in the past, especially if they were more than two years ago. Yeah. What if you don't really have much experience, well what do you do then? Well, you put your education in the first position. So, you would want to put your education first. In the experience CV, the education isn't the most important thing; that can go at the end or on the second page. And what if you're a freelance worker or a temporary worker? So, you've got lots of little jobs, what do you do then? Well, you choose a format where you're grouping your experience in most important projects that you did. It's not really about the time that you worked on something; it's about the skills that you acquired. So in this kind of CV, you really need to express all your skills, not how long it was, how long you were there, and this kind of thing like in a normal job. What not to include, then, on your British English CV? I think there's a difference between what's the law about what not to include and what's the actual practice. Because by law, we're not meant to put our date of births or photographs on CVs. But, it's, it does happen for certain kinds of jobs. Let's take this example: you move to London, and you're trying to get a job in London, and you want to do a waitressing job or a bar job, or something like that. If you go into independent places, independent places and maybe not like... Maybe they don't really know about the law, and actually they do want to know how old you are. So, in... I'm not telling you to do it, I'm just saying that it happens that some people choose to put this information on their CVs. I, this is a just a personal thing of mine: on a CV, I just find it completely pointless that somebody puts headings like "email" and then puts an email address after it with a name in it, because it's obviously your email. It's like a word that we don't need. We don't need to see that on the CV. Same with "mobile". We know what a mobile number looks like. So pointless headings I don't like, and also, I don't like the title at the top, when somebody writes "CV" or "Curriculum Vitae" which is a Latin word, because we obviously know it's a CV. So, I'm against pointless extra words on CVs.