Whether you are currently a student or a graduate, you’ll soon be including your degree on your CV. To do this you need a comprehensive skills audit of your degree. Auditing your degree enables you to extract and highlight the skills that employers will value most from your degree. Once you’ve done this, you can write a compelling CV. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how you can audit your degree to make your graduate CV stand out.
What is a Skills Audit?
A skills audit is a method that job seekers can use to assess their own capabilities. This makes it easier for candidates to break down and assess their own skill set. Once you’ve refined your set of skills you can compare them with the skills requirement in job descriptions. This will help you see which jobs are most suitable for you and whether you need to expand your skills.
You can get a skills audit for free and it comes in different forms. They may be self-guided surveys, questionnaires and interviews. There are multiple free skills auditing tests you can do online such as this from Career Smart. Here at Graduate Coach, we also teach students and recent graduates how to complete skills audits and also what skills employers value the most. In our NTI course, we break down the 9 key employability skills that prospective employers look out for. Knowing this makes a skills audit so useful and auditing your degree will help you meet those 9 skills.
1: Review Your Degree Program
A good place to start when auditing your degree is the university website. You may remember when applying for your course you read through the subject page on the university website. This is a useful start as you can quickly re-acquaint yourself with the modules and topics you’ve covered over the last few years. Having this list is great for writing your CV as you can extract interesting subjects and information to give your CV more depth. The list gives an insight into the work you did and points to the skills you would have developed. For example, in a Philosophy degree the classes in ‘Logic’ indicate that you developed good analytical skills to complete the course.
It is good practice to go through your list and think about the learning outcomes of each subject. Throughout your degree, each subject taught would produce a particular learning outcome. Once you’ve figured out what that learning outcome is, think about what skill the outcome helped you develop. Was the learning outcome about learning a technical skill? Did learning the subject allow you to practise a skill for example writing essays to practise creative writing? These skills will be a core part of your CV and important points to use in your interview.
2: Identify Acquired Skills
Once you’ve gone through the degree program and tallied up learned outcomes, look for the core skills of the degree. With the list you’ve compiled, you can gain a picture of the core fundamental skills that your degree program taught. It’s also worth casting your mind back to when you were completing your course. The course summary on the website won’t go into detail so think of instances that developed skills not included. A potential example of this could be group presentations that helped you develop into a good team player.
It is useful to extract as many skills as you can from your degree. Even the non-core skills can help give your CV greater depth. But the most important is to get the core skills of your degree. This can be subject-specific knowledge, technical skills specific to the field or analytical ability.
Once you refined down the core skills of your degree you now have to focus on the most transferable skills. To do this look at the types of jobs you will be applying for. Read through the job description and find the key skills they are looking for. Once you’ve found them, compare them with your skills audit to find the transferable skills. Remember the 9 key skills we talked about earlier as these are the ones you need to prioritise. When writing about your degree in your CV it’s best to construct it around these skills. Here is a great article to help you write a great CV.
3: Practical Skills in Your Degree
When auditing your degree, it is important to view the entirety of your time at university. Yes, the most important aspect of your degree is what you gained academically and your other activities. Think about projects that may have not contributed to your final grade but gave you experience. For example, class presentations might not be the focus of your degree like your dissertation is, but they still teach you key skills.
Also, consider your extracurricular activities such as sports, clubs, societies and the student union. Employers don’t like people who do the bare minimum. Showing your enthusiasm for extracurricular activities makes you an appealing candidate. If you are a student and want advice on how to juggle all this, have a read of this article on how to balance all this.
4: Utilise Examples
To give your CV depth, it is best to tell your story. Most employers read multiple boring CVs when recruiting. You need to stand out with a well-written CV packed with skills and experience. You need to tell your story and make it compelling. The best way to tell your story in a CV is with detailed examples of success stories where you showed skills. The stories demonstrate that you have experience and are capable. Here are some tips on what to remember when writing a great CV while telling your story.
5: Organise your Findings
As well as writing your story well, you need to lay out the entirety of your skills. You don’t want your CV to be paragraph after paragraph. Categorising your skills in a table format will be much appreciated by employers reading. Organise all your skills in table format. Have column A with the key skills and column B with how you obtain and demonstrate this. Remember, employers read through numerous CVs at a time and have to get through many in a day. You want to make the CV readable and engaging but not drag on. The organised table format allows the employer to skim through your CV while picking up all the important facts about you.
6: Match Job Description
Finally, when auditing your CV, tailor the skills to the job description of your job of choice. To ace your job hunting and land your dream job you need to be specific. You need the employer to feel like you really want the role. Many make the mistake of writing a ‘one size fits all’ CV. You need to personalise your CV to the job you are applying for. Each job advertisement has a description of the skills they want from an ideal candidate. Examine the core skills required for the job and match them with your core skills. See what particular skills the employer emphasises and prioritise those skills in your CV writing. Demonstrate achievements that show these skills and show your experience.
Summary
To wrap up, you need a comprehensive skills audit of your degree. This is because focusing on skills is the key to writing a great CV. The best CVs amplify the skills of the candidate, particularly the skills required by the role. Just mentioning your degree in your CV is not enough. It has to be dissected of all its usefulness and presented perfectly within your CV.
Featured image by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels.
Written by Laurence Stables
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