Week 5-7 - CV Building from scratch

"Never lie on a CV... just tell the right version of the truth"

Peter

Many of our group are creating CV's from scratch. Most experienced trouble getting their ideas down onto their CV's in a professional way, but also in a simple enough way that they can understand and elaborate on in an interview. The toughest part is getting the words to come from them, which is taking longer than expected as they have never created CV's and are unfamiliar with the language and layout needed. 


A lot of our group are relying on mine and Anhar's expert input and although it's tempting to take charge and show them how it's done, we had to insist on them learning to create it themselves. They will all need to continuously update and change their CV's throughout their life and so need to learn as soon as possible. Some of the key points include:

• Using the right words
• Keeping to one page
• Using an easy to read font and format
• Having good use of white space
• Keeping it all relevant to the job

Psychometric Test
We performed a psychometric test to discover the type of learner each of our participants are. We purposely kept the language in its original (and complex) language to test how our participants would deal with a situation which was out of their comfort zone. Only one person really shone and tried her best to understand the words using the context of the sentence. Others had an extremely difficult time and made no effort to hide how they felt about what we were putting them through. Some wanted to stop midway and had to be encouraged to finish, while others asked about what words meant after literally EVERY question. 


The results of the test displayed what kind of learner they were. But their approach to completing the questionnaire said MUCH more about their personality and ability to cope with a situation where they are out of their depth. 


We finished up with a quick game of "the tired robot" to de-stress afterwards. It's very interesting to see how quickly they flipped from stressed out to giddy with excitement after such a simple game.