"Ideal" Contractor CV

[abu1]

Its hard for contractors to keep Cv to the ideal 2 page limit. My jobs in last 2 years fills up 1 page alone. Best is to use paragraphs describing last 2 jobs in detail the rest user 1 line or bullet points

[oscarose]

Think about your CV in terms of a snipers bullet. You get one shot into the agent then it has to travel through the clients HR department and hit the manager square in the face...

Word allows 24 lines per page. I automatically dump anything longer than 4 pages because it tells me the candidate has not bothered to think about what is relevant to me and thinks I want to read 10 pages of everything from year dot...

So for a 4 sided cv thats just 96 lines to give enough information to get you in the door. Now allow for word searching and blank lines to make the CV more readable, and bare in mind that the agency will hack your CV into bits, not trying too hard to fit it into their own template. If you have ever had the misfortune to receive a batch of agency CV's while hiring someone it looks a bit like the results of a gorilla pushing an elephant into a mini.

IMO if your career spans more than 10 years and your education and other un-interesting crap is still taking up space. What you risk saying is that I have done so little since I left school or university I need to leave this crap in to fill space. God forbid that the result is a 2:2 in meejya studies! At least have the grace to crow about a relevant subject with a great result... To me a first says I did what I came to do. None of this drinking mans degree crap

For the last 8 years my name, email address and mobile number have been shoved into the Headers and Footers, just so I can tell my clients about all the fantastic stuff I have done in the other 96 lines...

There are things in a contractors CV that speak volumes more than education. Namely Length of gig and number of extensions in that time. Repeat clients and most of all, the ability for the candidate to be concise and tell me what I want to know about them thats relevant to the role that I have in my team...

I understand your point of view bob and I've come across many 'degree' bashers in my time and you're entitled to your opinion.

Without my degree, I wouldn't have a successful career in I.T and the computing element of my combined science degree indeed gave me an excellent grounding in database theory/Codd/3rd normal form etc (before I studied that module I didn't have a clue what kind of job I wanted).

I believe a relevant degree demostrates some form of intelligence combined with application, demonstrated by your achievements in your working life, is a winning combination.

I'm slightly biased as I'm the only person in our entire family history with a degree (not that I ever gloat about it) and that isn't changing soon...

[tractor]

...

I understand your point of view bob and I've come across many 'degree' bashers in my time and you're entitled to your opinion.

Without my degree, I wouldn't have a successful career in I.T and the computing element of my combined science degree indeed gave me an excellent grounding in database theory/Codd/3rd normal form etc (before I studied that module I didn't have a clue what kind of job I wanted).

I believe a relevent degree demostrates some form of intelligence combined with application, demonstrated by your achievements in your working life, is a winning combination.

I'm slightly biased as I'm the only person in our entire family history with a degree (not that I ever gloat about it) and that isn't changing soon...

Fair do's but there are many of us who were too 'busy' during our formative years to take advantage so we had to spend countless unpaid hours studying Codd and working out what a tuple was and how B trees worked.

I spent the first several years of my career in the army, where we were certainly blessed with our fair share of 'educated idiots' - aka 'Ruperts'. Following a long career in IT and BA, I have to assert that the army does not have a monopoly in that respect

[geoffreywhereveryoumaybe]

Get your CV reviewed?

A couple of years ago, I contacted a cv review service at w ww.thefullercv.com. They would charge for a full CV review but a freebie was that if you sent in your cv they would give some feedback on it and the free feedback that I got was useful

[oscarose]

Hit my inbox this morning...

Live webinar on how to write an effective CV for the contrac... - Eventbrite

[The Spartan]

Well your CV is a representation of you so people have cottoned onto that fact in a bid to make money, I laugh when people put words on their CV's that they don't even understand

[bobspud]

I understand your point of view bob and I've come across many 'degree' bashers in my time and you're entitled to your opinion.

Without my degree, I wouldn't have a successful career in I.T and the computing element of my combined science degree indeed gave me an excellent grounding in database theory/Codd/3rd normal form etc (before I studied that module I didn't have a clue what kind of job I wanted).

I believe a relevant degree demostrates some form of intelligence combined with application, demonstrated by your achievements in your working life, is a winning combination.

I'm slightly biased as I'm the only person in our entire family history with a degree (not that I ever gloat about it) and that isn't changing soon...

Ah but your key is at least you picked a relavent degree. It's easy to bash degrees when you find people willing to boast about a 2:2 in philosophy while wondering why the best offer they have of a job is McDonalds.

I partied hard instead of working at school so it was no real shock that I bust out with one good A-level (computer science) I went to night school to correct the situation and got a distinction in business and finance. I pottered around the city looking clueless and spending more time hacking into the mainframes than I did doing my day job and finally got the sack and told to stop waisting my time. I worked for a small start up as a DB programmer then went to ICL where The manager was far more interested in the fact my dad had just picked up an ex ICL company car (I had borrowed it to go to the interview and the guy recognised it...) I got the job but at the time I was pissed that he had no interest in the countless hours that I put in getting top marks at something that was not shotgunning beer or removing bra tops... The rest is history and here I am.

[SueEllen]

I got the job but at the time I was pissed that he had no interest in the countless hours that I put in getting top marks at something that was not shotgunning beer or removing bra tops... The rest is history and here I am.

Degrees are used by a lot of companies as a filtering mechanism to short list candidates especially if you are permanent.

As a contractor it's not necessary that you have one but it can help. I've seen adverts/got emails through where they insist you have a degree.

Though personally I've never been inclined to apply for such positions as some of the most interesting people (including those who are well versed in some random subject) I have met and know don't have a degree.