STUDENT ADVICE# 2: FACTORS AFFECTING CREATION OF AN EFFECTIVE CURRICULUM VITAE

1. Choose a clear font such as Arial or Times New Roman, size 10 or 12. Bold your headings.
2. Ensure your name, address, telephone number and email contact details are at the top of your first page. Think carefully about how your email address, telephone answering message come across as these are a potential employer's first impression of you; they should be business-like.
3. Remember that your potential an employer may have received 40–200 applications for one vacancy so The interview panel will skim read and match the CV experience with the job specification, so tailoring your CV to the job is essential to ensure you get an interview.
4. Two pages as a basic CV with any extra adaptations if required. For example, if you have a lot of customer care experience that you would like to say more about have an extra page titled “Profile of customer care experience.”
5. Have a positive personal profile and key skills that represent you and your experience.
6. Career summary: begin with your most recent work experience first.
7. Avoid abbreviations and words that you wouldn’t normally use.
8. Bullet points are an effective way of highlighting your achievements in work, university or voluntary work. 
9. Shine a light on your positive qualities, positive people are much more attractive to employers.
10. Make sure you have ensured your dates flow, if you changed jobs and had an extended holiday,
11. make sure to write this down and what you gained from the experience, avoid gaps in dates.
12. Write references available on request rather than waste valuable space with names, addresses.
13. Beware your spell check as you may end up with the American spelling of words.
14. Get a friend, colleague to read through your completed CV.
15. Be proud of your CV as it represents all of your personal and professional accomplishments and be prepared to talk about yourself through your CV.

STUDENT ADVICE#1: FACTORS AFFECTING CONFIDENCE AT WORKPLACE

SELF-CONFIDENCE:

Self-confidence can be boiled down to the belief that a person has it in their ability to succeed at a task, based on whether or not they have been able to perform the task in the past. However, there are actually two aspects of self-confidence. The first is competence, whether or not you have the necessary skills and abilities to complete a task. The second is self-assurance and whether or not you believe that you have the ability to complete the task. Think about this for a moment; you might have been trained in interview skills, but you might not feel comfortable in interviews. In this case, you would have the competence but lack the self-assurance. On the other hand, you could believe that you have the ability to do something but not have the skills to actually carry it through. In this case, you are very self-assured, but you don’t have the competence to do the job. True self-confidence occurs when both competence and self-assurance are in balance with each other. Self-confidence has been shown to be important in the recovery from injury, overcoming setbacks, and moving through negative experiences in life. Someone with self-confidence has a belief that they will be able to recover, move past the negative, and again experience the positive. In the business world, self-confidence functions in much the same way. It enables an employee to recover from setbacks and challenges and continue to move forward.

SELF-ESTEEM:

Self-esteem is the capacity to respect and think well of yourself. It means that you appreciate yourself as a unique individual with your own set of skills, talents, and abilities. David Burns defines self-esteem as “the capacity to experience maximal self-love and joy whether or not you are successful at any point in your life.” Psychologist Maxine Elliott has researched self-esteem and realized that people’s self-esteem will vary from individual to individual when they are facing a setback. People who have a high level of self-esteem will be able to respond to a damaging event by using their past experience and their coping abilities and will not have much damage to their current level of self-esteem. They will still see themselves as valuable and talented even if the current evidence seems to indicate otherwise.

However, most people will experience some loss of self-esteem when they face a negative situation and unfortunately, those who already have low self-esteem will also experience the largest reduction in what little self-esteem they have. In other words, they will see their failure as further proof that they are incapable of being successful. This type of negative cycle will perpetuate itself each time that a person with low self-esteem faces failure, criticism or roadblocks.

SELF-EFFICACY:

Albert Bandura is considered an expert on the concept of self-efficacy. He stated that people perceive their own self-efficacy as “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances. It is concerned not with the skills one has but with the judgments of what one can do with whatever skills one possesses.” In other words, self-efficacy is an individual’s evaluation of their own ability to be successful in attaining a specific goal.

Bandura stated that the amount of self-efficacy a person has is dependent on their ability to apply coping behaviors, increase their level of effort, and how long they will be able to retain their optimism when facing difficult obstacles and experiences. In addition, he stated that the more a person is tested by facing their fears and stepping outside of their comfort zones, the more they will enhance their sense of self-efficacy. If a person does not have a base level of self-efficacy, they will be unwilling to attempt a new task or challenge, which could, of course, hold them back in the workplace. The greater your self-efficacy, the more willing you will be to grow your skills by attempting new challenges and the less you will be affected if you don’t succeed.