Your CV for your training contract applications may turn out to be one of the most important pieces of work you ever produce. That’s right, you should be looking at it as a piece of work that you take pride in rather than something that just needs to be thrown together to enable you to submit job applications.
There are a few key things you always need to keep in mind when you set about writing that killer CV to land you your dream training contract:
1. Your CV, together with your covering letter, will be the first introduction you are making to your potential employer.
2. It will be viewed in competition with many other CV’s.
3. It will form the basis of much of what you will be asked at interview.
Time and care should therefore be taken over your CV, both in terms of its content and its appearance. If this is your chance to make a good first impression and to stand out from the crowd then a poorly set out, or worded, CV will often blow that chance for you.
Make things easy for the recruiter by writing short and succinct points rather than long wordy sentences. Most recruiters will find the job of wading through lots of different CV’s highly tedious so it’s up to you to make their job easier by presenting them with the right information in an easy to read and understand format.
A CV for a training contract should fit onto 2 pages of A4 (except where extraordinary experience or skills need to be displayed, eg in the case of mature students) and include the following:
- Basic personal details (not your religion, favourite colour, waist size, etc)
- Education and qualifications going back to secondary school
- Legal work experience
- Other law related activities and experience that display your interest in the law
- Additional information including IT skills and other relevant skills (include your driving licence if you have one as some smaller firms might require this)
- Interests and achievements
You might also highlight a short list of your relevant strengths although this is optional and should never be forced just for the sake of it.
Many CV’s accompanying training contract applications can be quite one dimensional, particularly if there is little legal work experience on them. If this is the case, then non-legal work experience or interests can be used if they are able to demonstrate skills that might be valued by a law firm.
As for interests and achievements, some people add these as a bit of an afterthought and miss the chance to use them to demonstrate additional skills. Always try to flesh these out to something more that just a record of what you do. Expand them to say what they have given you in terms of skills, even if they are just life skills such as working as part of a group.
You should also remember that in an interview you will most likely be asked about the interests you put down on your CV. This is therefore a great opportunity for you to develop rapport with your interviewer so think through which of your interests will best lend themselves to an interesting discussion at interview.
A professionally presented CV can often be the very thing that gets a candidate an interview so you should ensure that yours is as good as it possibly can be.
