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CVs and cover letters

resume

What is a CV?

  • Roughly translates to "the course of my life" Latin
  • A written overview of your skills, education, and work experience Reed
  • Your 7-second foot in the door Glassdoor

How to write a CV

  • Keep it to one page
  • Keep it simple - you want both tech and non-tech people to understand it
  • Keep it relevant - if they only pick out ten words at random, they should still have a good sense that you're worth interviewing
  • Preface with two / three lines max that help an employer see your personality (passion and ambition to go with your experience…)

Bear in mind…

  • Frame any previous experience in terms of software development (building, learning, prioritising)
  • Highlight any relevant education and training, and interests / hobbies that would make you a great colleague (e.g. coaching at Codebar)
  • Refer to everything you do as "developer" first… real world UX, scrum facilitation and QA people typically can't write code.

What is a cover letter?

  • Additional insights about your motivations and ambitions
  • More personalised than the CV
  • The briefer the better

How to write a cover letter

  • Keep it to less than one page
  • This should be noticeably relevant to the company and role
  • Establish your passion, your ambition and your experience, making specific references to technologies and behaviours that they mention in the job description

Bear in mind

  • Typically you get a text box into which you should paste your 'cover letter'
  • I would write max. 2 paragraphs that is more narrative than your CV, use this as a template for all applications
  • Ideally you can just change a few words to make it feel relevant to any job

A quick note about next week

future

From next week until the end of the course

You will be:

  • In project teams
  • Looking at jobs
  • Briefly updating the cohort on progress

Today's fun

CVs

  • Look at FAC18's CVs
  • Discuss which bits you like, what you'd do differently
  • List out your current 'tech stack'
  • Get on Flow CV and add sections you want to include. You will come back to this over the next several weeks
  • Imagine an ideal company and role, and write a couple of paragraphs to them explaining why are you the right candidate (this will be your cover letter template)

Cool

cool

Resources

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