Career Academy

THE ‘PERFECT’ CV

Tips from the TU/e career academy

A Curriculum Vitae or CV is a document that everyone will have to make at some point in their life. Your CV is essentially a logbook of all your experiences. Most people will actually continue updating it over and over again. As you develop, the things that once seemed relevant may become trivial. In this article, the way should approach your CV will be discussed and some practical pointers and tips will be given.

The elements of a CV

For such a compact document, a CV has an abundance of information. Creating a structure that works is therefore important. Some recruiters make a call on a CV in a matter of seconds. A clear subdivision of information will therefore help highlight the information they are looking for. Let’s go over the common elements.

• Heading: A CV starts with you, the most highlighted element is thus your name. Sometimes the abbreviation CV or a full ‘Curriculum Vitae’ is added, this is optional though. You could see this as the title of your document. • Picture: Adding a picture is becoming more common but is fully optional. Check the pictures on the employee page of a company website if you want to check how you are dressed. • Personal information: Aside a name, add a list of contact and general information. Always include an email or postal address as a means to send you a response, you can add a phone number as well. If you added your e-mail, you can simplify your address to your town of residence. Do not remove it, it is used as a travel time indication. Aside this, a date of birth and nationality are commonly added as well. Finally, a customized LinkedIn link is smart to add. If you sent your CV digitally, put in the effort to have a working link. • Profile text: Some people add a text to introduce themselves in a more personal manner. If you decide to write something, try to answer these questions: Who are you, what are you good at and what do you want? • Education: As a fresh graduate, your diploma is your most relevant experience. Other than for your high school education, try adding some text or bullet points giving more details. Some add the average grade, or the name and grade of their graduation projects (a 7.5 or more is advised for this). Others describe which specialization was actually studied and others highlight some relevant courses. • Work experience: After your first full-time job in your field, this section becomes more relevant than education. However, as a fresh graduate it is smarter to list education first and adjust this order later on in life. With jobs you want to describe tasks and responsibilities in a telegram style matter. It is also nice to highlight measurable achievements, such as a sales increase of 10% due to something you did. • Extracurricular activities: This section is exclusive to students and contains things like committees, board years, student teams or voluntary work. Approach this like work and describe tasks and responsibilities. Add the hours per week activities took, this shows how much time you were able to spend aside your studies. It might actually be smart to add jobs under this section as well, leaving out ‘work experience’ entirely for now.

WRITTEN BY KOEN VLOT

• Skills: This is section is split up into two categories: language skills and computer or hard skills. Either indicate your skill level with a term or something visual. For languages terms like ‘working efficiency’ or ‘mother tongue’ work well, for computer skills ‘intermediate’ or ‘expert’ are good. If you want to do something more visual, a percentage bar or a 5 point ranking system are a nice ways to change things up from plain text. • Hobbies: Some people list a set of 3-5 hobbies to show some more of their personality, this is purely optional. If you decide to do add it, try to think of what you want to showcase. Something like sports or culinary interests generally do well. • References: This is a list of people that can confirm some of your experiences and tell about your strengths. It is not common for a graduate or student to add. People that do add it simply state: ‘Available upon request’.

Perfect is the enemy of good

Have you ever talked about a good CV with others? After multiple conversations around the topic though my work at TU/e Career Academy, it was surprising to see that recruiters have different standards amongst each other. An engineer or manager will have an even more radically different view on the topic. The main reason for this, is what each of them wants from a CV. A recruiter will use it as a reference to go over a supplied checklist of requirements. They will want to read less and have clearly presented bullets to go over quickly. An engineer will look for relevant skills and knowledge, going for a more detailed look.

Aside the role of the reader, it is also a question of preference. Some things just come down to personal taste. A CV is really personal, so dare to go with your gut when it comes to presentation and what elements make it into your CV. So, the ‘perfect’ CV does not exist. You have to think about how you want to present yourself to the reader and adjust. It takes time but adjust your CV for every application, just like a cover letter.

Some practical insights

A CV is a matter of preference but there are some handy tips to help you make smarter decisions. • Keep it factual: A CV is based on facts, don’t add soft skills to your skills section like ‘teamwork’. Try to incorporate these things within experiences. For example, mention group projects in your education. Imply but don’t claim. • Have a hierarchy: Think how you can add levels of importance to your lay-out. Differentiate elements like font, size and color between the main entry and a description or a highlighted certificate. This helps the reader understand what to expect. • Stay consistent: Keep your styling consistent. Do you use bullet points or paragraphs of text? Did you add a grade for your master? Add it for you bachelor as well. Elsewise a reader will notice inconsistencies and maybe bring it up in an interview. • 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes check: Ask someone to look at your CV for 30 seconds and tell you what pops out. Repeat this at different durations to understand what information is highlighted most and adjust the design where needed. • Grayscale: Print your CV in grayscale to check the contrast, especially when you have a more creative design. Some recruiters still print CV’s and will not bother to print in color.

TU/e Career Academy

Hopefully, this article provided some new insights for you. We have a lot more reading material available on our website as well (tuecareeracademy.nl) and provide CV checks for all TU/e students. Just send us an e-mail with your CV, cover letter and/or LinkedIn via careeracademy@tue.nl.

TEAM CORE

Enabling the recycling of e-waste

WRITTEN BY MATTHIJS SCHEERDER

Why recycling e-waste?

The planet is running out of rare, precious metals at an alarming pace. This trend can be attributed to the current mentality of consumerism where there is no care for reprocessing. Electronics especially are consumed in a cradle-to-grave fashion, partly by lacking awareness and legislation. At the moment only 15-20% of all the e-waste is being ‘recycled’, the rest ends up in landfills somewhere in Asia or Africa. At these landfills in distant places, it is in harmful and polluting conditions for both man and nature where the very poorest can make a living by going through our waste. For western countries, the dependence on China for its supply of rare earths makes it a threat to defence and security. The current expected growth rate of e-waste of 8% per year makes a further argument why recycling should be taken seriously. Closing this cycle should thus have the utmost priority, unfortunately, current processing techniques can’t provide satisfactory solutions yet.

How do we contribute to a 100% recycling rate?

We at Team CORE address the problem by actively developing and improving a technique based on the earth’s natural process itself: elementary retraction. Elementary retraction by the earth is the process of waste slowly descending through the earth’s crust, where it breaks down under high temperature and pressure when reaching the CORE. This process, however, takes several millions of years, time we don’t have. At Team CORE the same principle of applying pressure and heat is applied to the development of our own oven systems, shortening the process to just a few hours. Being an ambitious, diverse team with people from all different technological backgrounds, we try to upscale this technology and make it commercially applicable aiming to reach a recycling rate of 100%.

What does Team CORE do?

At the moment we have several ongoing projects, while the focus is on tackling the e-waste problem, we also look into other areas where we can apply our technology, like polluted soil and impregnated wood recycling. We are also not only focused on the oven technology itself. To improve its effectiveness, additional development is needed in the pretreatment of waste as well. One of these projects is the design and construction of a battery shredder installation, completely ground-breaking since no shredder of this kind exists yet. We not only aim for fully recycling metals, but we also investigate the possible useful applications for our side products basalt and obsidian, like the production of garden tiles and flower pots. We thus also seek to lower our own waste to zero, being a truly circular company in an increasingly circular economy.

What can you do?

First and foremost, everyone should be more aware of recycling in general, not just recycling e-waste. Just by doing small things, you can make a positive change every day. Furthermore, we are always looking for new enthusiastic people who want to help us in reaching our goals, especially hands-on mechanical engineers who have enough interesting projects to choose from! Joining Team CORE would not only provide you with the opportunity to apply your knowledge to an exciting and relevant area, but it will also give you the chance to deepen your knowledge by working in an interdisciplinary team. If you are interested in joining Team CORE and want to contribute to the transition to a circular economy or simply want to learn more about the current problem of e-waste, visit our website at corechemistry.com. If you want to stay up to date you can follow us on Instagram at @teamcoretue. Finally, you can contact us for questions through email at info@core-chemistry.

com.