CV Workshops at CCN

The Delivery Team ran four hour-long workshops with City College Norwich students today, helping them with preparing their CVs for an upcoming careers event - where they will get to meet potential employers!

There were a range of requirements from students including help with personal statements, tweaking CVs and templates and even building CVs from scratch.

A main focus of our sessions this time was the need to put together an interesting personal statement that not only invites the employer to read more of the CV, but also presents the candidate and their skills, preferences and personal traits in a positive yet authentic way.

In this age of digital assistants and AI, it's relatively straightforward to 'magic up' a personal statement very quickly....but is it accurate, is it interesting and does it actually sound like you?

CVs do need to be set out well to make them easy to read, they do need to be free of spelling errors or the type of construction or grammatical problems that might make them confusing.....

.......but do they need to be linguistically 'perfect' in the way that ChatGPT or CoPilot might suggest?

We worked with students to help them present themselves clearly yet authentically - retaining their personality and even some of their idiosyncrasies in the statements to make each one more unique - and hopefully more useful and interesting to employers.

What do you think?  Should all personal statements be as polished and objective as a professor's thesis, or are you looking for a bit of personality from your candidates?  (No offence to the professors out there!)