This article is mostly aimed at professionals who have had extensive work experience and need to figure out a new way to display their skills and resume in a smooth and easy way. Some people opt for a mix of both CV styles to better accommodate their skillset.
Reverse Chronological
This style is apparently the most common/popular way of listing your previous job experience and it is used by people who had jobs for a long time or without many gaps between jobs. This type of CV is useful to show the progression one has made in a company or industry and how they rose in the ranks and gives an insight of how ambitious the applicant is.
While sometimes referred to as the Functional style, organizing your CV in that way is best if you didn’t jump around too many industries and organizations as listing tons of jobs take space and might signal commitment issues, which some organizations would rather not have.
Professional Skills
Do you have a gap in your work experience history? Had trouble finding your calling in life? Are you a digital nomad who works freelance and fulltime with a company? Or even if you’re a recent grad with little to no work experience, then this style is better for you!
With this CV type you would be listing relevant skills and job functions that intersected with different roles and positions. This way recruiters would know more about your abilities and you could give a summary of the years you did a certain job without listing all the projects you did.
Hybrid (Mix between the 2 styles)
The unfortunate thing about the professional skills CV is that while the person reading your resume would know about what you can do but without the context of positions and where you carried out your responsibilities that can make a big difference in how employers view your application.
This is where the Hybrid CV comes in, you can mention the most influential jobs and projects you worked on and list the support skills from different gigs that you would use for the position you’re applying to.
Closing Comments
There is a cheat sheet that refers to dos and don’ts on a CV here CV Writing Basics you ought to follow no matter what CV style you opt for, but the most important rules are that your CV should be as follows:
- Keep it short and easy to follow, no one wants to hear your detailed life story.
- Make it exciting and colorful and be creative in how you visualize skill levels using images instead of words.
- ONLY put the relevant skills and previous positions for a particular job and cut the “needless” skills that you feel aren’t important to the company you want to work for, and you can always state them in the job interview if you feel the need to do so.
