Communication Skills 2

Pharos University in Alexandria

Topic 1: Career planning & CV writing

Job Market ambience:

The 21st century job market offers new opportunities and challenges. The opportunities are
extremely competitive. Therefore, you need to stand out from the crowd of applicants.

Your first steps towards your goal must be as followed:

1. Brainstorm your short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals, then list them in
chronological order.
2. Think about your current situation. What are your strengths and weaknesses? (SWOT
Analysis)
SWOT analysis means: a study undertaken by an organization to identify its internal
strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threat.

3. What skills do you have? What skills would you like to develop? Be honest to yourself.
4. You also need to be aware of what employers want. Today’s most required skills are divided
into hard and soft skills.
§ Hard skills are specific quantifiable skills like the knowledge of languages or computer
program literacy.
§ Soft skills are related to your personality, such as being sociable, working well in a team,
being diplomatic, and so on.

In a situation that it is completely competitive so many applicants have a multitude of hard skills,
you really need to highlight your soft skills. According to LinkedIn, the five most in demand
soft skills are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

§ Creativity: taking a new perspective towards anything, designing an innovative solution

to challenges.
§ Persuasion: is the ability to convince others to take a particular course of action by
explaining your ideas coherently.
 § Collaboration: means working together with colleagues or partners to arrive at a common
goal. Nowadays is normal to work in teams and to involves with people from diverse
backgrounds.
§ Adaptability: means flexibility, willingness to change to new circumstances, and learn
from your experience.
§ Emotional intelligence: is a skill at being aware of your emotions and those of others
along with managing your emotions and your relationships; a skill that you can learn.
5. Skills can help you, but you must find your ideal vacancy.

The Internet makes it easier to find a vacancy. List your dream companies. Then search for
vacancies on their website. Glassdoor and LinkedIn are one of best websites to search on. Read
the requirements. A good rule is that if you do not meet at least 80% or above of the requirements,
then do not apply.

Application:

§ SWOT Analysis.

§ Short-, Medium- and long-term goals.

 Communication Skills 2

Pharos University in Alexandria

CV/ Resume
 What are the differences between CV & Resume?

Resume: is a one- to two-page document presenting key facts about your professional experience,
educational background, and skills.

CV: the term CV is an abbreviation of (Curriculum Vitae) a longer document that details the whole
course of your career.

A resume is used for job search, a CV—for academic purposes

Resume
Resume is the most important documents for job applicants and recruiters. It is main goal is to get
you a job. But the immediate goal of your resume is to get you to the next stage in job hunting, the
interview.
What is a resume, what should it include?
Firstly, a resume is not a list of your qualifications. A resume is not a list of your previous jobs.
And a resume is not a list of your skills.
Secondly, think of your resume as a marketing tool. It contains of content, and design.
Firstly, Content:
§ It includes only your skills and experience, but also external factors such as culture. Like,
in many countries, employers are forbidden to make job offers based on personal
characteristics, such as race, sex, age, marital status, etc. Your resume should not include
any personal information. For example, no photo, no information on your gender, no age
or date of birth, no marital status, no information about whether you have children or not.
§ Some career advisors recommend writing an objective at the top of the resume. For
example, Some Scholars think objective is unnecessary as it says nothing about what
you can do for the company.
§ First, your name, this should be at the top of the resume and clearly stand out. Next, your
contact details like your phone number with international country code, postal address
 (optional), LinkedIn account and your email address if you have. It is best not to use
your work email address or non-professional email. It looks disrespectful to the current
employer.
§ Then you either include your education or your work experience. It depends on what you
want to emphasize most of all. For jobs which concentrate on academic qualifications, or
if you do not have much work experience, you might write the education section first.
§ In your education section, you should write the name of the educational institution,
location, title, and date of your qualification. Some applicants give the month and year,
but some Scholars believe, the year alone is enough. You may include your grade
according to your university grading system like GPA. If it is poor grades, do not include.
Include the same information in other degrees. If you already have or are about to receive
a university degree, there is no need to write about your high school education.
For example:

Alexandria University, Egypt Sept.2018-Anticipate.2021

Faculty of Engineering
Master’s degree

§ In education section also include information about professional courses that you have
taken that is relevant to the job.
§ In employment section include all your relevant work experience, volunteering and
internships are welcomed if relevant. If you do not have much work experience, try to gain
experience through volunteering and internships at organizations in your target field. If you
are still a student, the best transferable experience is gained through organizing events. As
Organizing the event requires you to be creative, to be able to persuade and collaborate
with others. You need to be adaptable to changing circumstances and possess emotional
intelligence.
§ For each company you worked in, write the name of the company, its location, your job
title, and the months and years of your employment. For your current job, if you are
employed, you can write the month and year to present.
§ In experience section, you for each job, you should include three to five bullet points with
strategic vocabulary to describe your key responsibilities.
For example:
P&G, Cairo, Egypt March 2016- December 2018
Industrial Engineer
• Conducted market research for X corporate clients.
• Designed client presentations for senior executives.

§ Then include your skills and languages section.

§ Add awards and honors relevant to your job application. Try to make it a quantifiable
achievement. For example, employee of the month for surpassing sales targets by 20%.
§ The final section of your resume is references. You can just write, references available upon
request or you can give their title, name, contact details like email address, phone number, and
postal address. One referee should be your current or former employer. A second referee could
be a former teacher, or a client, or someone who has worked with you in a professional or
educational capacity.
Secondly, Design:

It is estimated that up to 80% of resumes are discarded by recruiters after only 10 seconds. That is
why the design is important. Some experts recommend you create your own simple template using
a simple blank sheet. Leave margins on all sides, two and a half centimeters, or no less than one
and a half centimeters. US and Canada, the Resume standard size is the letter format. In other
countries, A4 is the standard format.

§ A typical resume is one page long for a person relatively new to the job market. or two pages
maximum for a more experienced professional.
§ An academic CV, including details of publications might be longer, but otherwise, keep it
short and to the point.
§ Organize your resume into separate logical sections, with appropriate headings.
§ Choose a professional font. It should be easily readable like Times New Roman, Ariel, or
Calibri. The font should be the same throughout your resume. Also, put on your consideration
the Font size. A good size is the 24-12-10 format. For example, your name = 24 points.
Headings = 12 points, and bullet point lists = 10 point. Apart from your name, everything else
§ There are three basic formats for your resume:
 - Reverse-chronological: is the most traditional format and emphasizes your upward career
mobility. That is your promotions and increased responsibilities. Start with your most
recent position and working back in reverse chronological order. It is suitable if you want
to apply for a job in the same or similar field or to highlight your history of professional
success by career progression. It is not suitable in case of gaps in your employment, or
often job changes.
- Functional: highlights your individual skill. It is suitable if you want to emphasis why
your skills make you an outstanding candidate for the job. This resume focusses on abilities
instead of experience.
- Combination: makes use of both two previous formats. It is more appropriate for
candidates with a long employment history.

As beginners, we will focus on the reverse-chronological resume.

Tips For effective CV:

1. Avoid unknown abbreviations

2. Bullet points are so effective for highlighting your achievements
3. Be proud of your CV because it represents you.
4. Avoid date gap.
5. Get a friend or a colleague to read through your completed CV.
6. Show how your professional achievements in the past added value, and how you can
harness these skills to add value in the future.
7. Save your resume as a pdf. You want the document to appear the same format on the
recruiter’s computer.
Case Study 1: Analyze the job advertisement in detail

Aim: To understand how to connect their skills by the advertised jobs.

1. What criteria are they looking for?

2. Compare your SWOT Analysis results to the job description.
3. Identify the Job specification in the job ad. It is a statement of employee characteristics and
qualifications required for satisfactory performance of defined duties and tasks comprising a
specific job or function.
4. Identify the job descriptions in the job ad. It is the duties and responsibilities.

Detailed Content Tips:

1. Draw parallels
List your previous jobs in chronological order with the most recent employment first.
If there are some parallels between your old company and the new one you are applying to,
then it’s worth providing information about their similarities. This can show the hiring manager
that you have the skills for the job and it is important if your current company isn’t well known.

2. Be factual

All aspects of your CV, including your dates of employment, must be factually correct. If you
have a gap year and are worried about how this may come across, you can always enter dates
as month-to-month or even year-to-year, rather than specific dates.
3. Prove you have what they want

Research the job details and personal specifications for the type of job you want. Then, under
each of the jobs in your experience section, use bullet points to illustrate that you have exactly
the skills and expertise they’re after.

4. Voluntary work counts

Where you have limited work experience, or are looking to change career entirely, other
experience outside of paid employment could show your capabilities. This might include
unpaid work placements, community activities, such as working with a charity or being a
student representative for your course.
For example, if you’re applying for an education job the hiring manager may be interested to
see previous voluntary work at a school or an after-school club.

5. Highlight your achievements

Many job hunters write their CVs like a job description. They faithfully list the duties they
performed and their responsibilities. However, they fail to show the positive impact of their
teamwork or contribution to the organisation.

6. Use positive language

- Choose your words carefully to reflect that you are a high performing, ‘can-do’ type of
employee. Recruiters want achievers. Use positive action verbs & adverbs.
- For instance, if you solved a problem or improved something, you could use action verbs
like engineered, revitalized, transformed. If you have experience leading a project, you
could use action verbs like coordinated, executed, orchestrated.
- Never include any implicit criticisms about previous jobs.
- If you refer to difficult challenges, explain how you helped overcome them or omit them
completely.
- Each bullet point about your previous roles should be made up of three components. An
action verb relating to your achievements, quantifiable information on your
achievement, and your relevant responsibility.
 Established Advised
Designed Recruited
Illustrated Trained
Improved Coached
Hypothesized Directed/Guided

7. Focus on your strengths:

instead of using the heading ‘career history’ and listing your jobs chronologically, try using
‘key skills and experience’. This will give you the flexibility to draw attention to the most
relevant career experiences you have had. You will still need to include a short employment
history with dates, but this can be relegated to the second page.

Top Strengths that Employers need in Employees1

• Analytics such as (Creativity-Good judgment and innovation)
• Communication such as (negotiation-verbal communication-Public speaking and
friendliness)
• Dependability such as (Attention to detail- accuracy-Time Management and
Professional)
• Leadership and Teamwork such as (Mentoring staff -Motivating staff- Providing
constructive criticism-Resolving conflicts -Strategic planning and decision making)
• Information Technology (It Test) such as (Email- presentation tools and familiar with
Microsoft programs)

Application:
- Resume.
- Resume on Canva Templates.

1
https://slinuacareers.com/8-major-types-interviews/