CV template: Skills-based/functional

If you’re changing careers, have extensive gaps in your employment history or have a series of roles in a short space of time, you may benefit from writing a skills-based / functional CV. This type of CV focusses on your key skills and personal attributes, over your employment experience.

To help you get started, we’ve teamed up with the experts at StandOut CV to produce a skills-based/functional CV template for you to use.

Choose your skills wisely

Before you start drafting your CV, you need to look at the key skills and requirements of the types of roles you’re applying for. Then you can start building a list of the attributes you need to include in your CV. This enables you to showcase your relevancy to employers, focussing on your potential, rather than your employment experience.

Create a skills summary

The first section of your CV after your professional profile should be your ‘skills summary’. Focus on the four key skills you have chosen (ensuring they are relevant to the job) and list out any key achievements related to these skills. For example, if you are highlighting your customer service abilities, you may wish to shout about the time you received a 100% positive feedback score from customers.

Your examples and achievements should be as specific as possible. Avoid including anything too vague; you need concrete examples in order to impress the employer.

Include your employment history

On the second page of your skills-based/functional CV, you can include a short employment history section. But remember, you don’t need to go into any detail here as you should have covered this in the previous section. Include the company name, your role title and the dates in which you worked there.

For more tips on how to write a CV,

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