Helpful Advice: Curriculum Vitae
So what advice would we pass on for those students out there looking for work experience? Here are our top tips!
1/ Persevere - emailing your CV through once is rarely enough, people are busy and sometimes mean to get back to you and then forget. Send a polite reminder, and follow up with a phonecall to make sure they’ve opened and read your CV.
2/ Send digital copies of your work – it’s important future employers know what you’re capable of creatively.
3/ Do something different- you have to be sure you’re an outstanding candidate. There are thousands of students looking for placements, you don’t necessarily have to be more talented than the next person, you just have to do something innovative, enterprising and unique to stand out.
4/ Build your network - we recently worked with a student who has built a contact book of editors from Vogue, major players in the visual merchandising and styling world and also the trend industry. You need to ‘collect’ people, get referrals, stay in touch with people you’ve worked with, it’s a small industry so word of mouth is a big deal.
5/ The devil is in the details - we get a surprising amount of emails with poor spelling and grammar, these go straight in the trash. It’s important to us that someone cares enough to get the basics right, and your CV should be one of the best examples of how much you care about page layouts, written work, and self-presentation. We get some jaw-droppingly brilliant CVs, so why would we follow up one with spelling mistakes?
6/ Show willingness to learn – one of the questions we ask in interview is ‘tell us about a recent example of when you went over and above what was expected of you’…we want to really get to the nitty gritty of your character and find out how you’ll cope in a fast-paced environment with loads of responsibility, where you’ll be expected to think independently and problem solve with a can-do attitude. Thanks to Trend Bible.
