Written By Natalie Lotter
For those who are looking at creating or enhancing their CV’s here are few tips to make your engineering CV really stand out that I have used over the years in my CV’s and my clients find very useful:
- The industry you work in. Sometimes this is not obvious, or your company is not well-known. A good starting point is to tell your reader what industry your are in eg. Chemical Industry / Steel industry / FMCG etc.
- What does your company manufacture? This is useful because perhaps the products are the same/ similar and could be an easy fit, but if you didn’t put it in, we wouldnt know. i.e Does your company manufacture pumps, or plastic packaging or steel chutes for the mining industry.
- What manufacturing processes do you use? This is critical for when we are looking for someone who has knowledge of a certain process i.e Worked with metal castings or plastic injection moulding process.
- Which machines do you work with? This is especially useful if you are in maintenance, projects or repair roles. It is greatly beneficial if you mention the name of the brand as well i.e. Allen Bradley PLC’s or Fanuc CNC. This could be in manufacturing or mining or instrumentation. Often clients look for a specific machine or product the person has worked on or sold and if you mention it, that is a big win!
- If you are in design: Which packages do you design in?
- If you are in projects, tell me about your projects, i.e what was the size/ rand value of the projects, what were you designing and building? We want to know what you did in these projects.
- Sales roles: What was your target? What was your best month in rand value? Which clients did you win over from the competition?
- Achievements: This sets you apart from the rest. It doesn’t have to be long and detailed. Give facts of what you did and what were the results. It could be awards you have won, or where you have saved the company time or money. i.e I changed the layout of the plant in the rubber division which resulted in faster outputs and 15% increase in revenue in our x line.
I hope these few tips help you and I wish you lots of success in finding your dream role!