You will produce a clean master CV and one tailored version ready to send.
You have pieces of a new CV scattered across the last four lessons. A plain-text test that showed what the software sees. Five bullets rewritten as results. A list of things to cut. A routine for tailoring. This exercise puts them together into two finished documents: a master CV you keep, and one tailored version you could send today.
Set aside about forty-five minutes. You will finish with a CV that a recruiter can scan in seconds and that an applicant tracking system can read without scrambling.
Open a new document rather than editing your old one, so old formatting does not creep back in. Use a single column. Use a common font at a readable size and keep your name larger than the rest.
Put your contact details in the body of the page, under your name. Leave the document's header area empty. Then add standard section headings in this order: Profile, Experience, Education, Skills. If you have relevant certifications, add a Certifications section after Education. Avoid tables, text boxes, icons and skill bar charts, for the reasons in lesson 3.1, How your CV is read: software first, then a person.
For each job, put the job title, employer and dates on their own lines so they stand out, and use the same date format throughout, such as "Mar 2022 to present".
Write a short profile aimed at your target role. Three lines is enough. A useful structure: who you are now, what you are good at with a hint of evidence, and what you are moving towards.
Wei Ling's profile for supply chain analyst roles reads: "Operations executive with five years in logistics, now moving into supply chain analytics. Builds Excel dashboards that operations managers use in weekly decisions. Completing a SQL course with a portfolio project on delivery data."
Arjun, the teacher from lesson 3.2, Turn duties into results, wrote one for learning and development roles: "Secondary school teacher with eight years designing lessons and assessments for mixed-ability classes. Designed programmes later adopted across the department. Moving into corporate learning and development."
Neither profile leans on adjectives such as "passionate" or "hardworking", and every claim in them is something a recruiter could check in an interview.
Work through each job, newest first. Under each, write your result bullets using the verb, action and outcome pattern from lesson 3.2. Put your strongest three at the top of each job, judged by relevance to your target role.
For older or less relevant roles, keep it short: title, employer, dates and one or two lines. Education goes in reverse order too, with your highest qualification first. Your skills section lists tools and skills you can back up, using the words from your market sheet in lesson 2.4, Build a market sheet for your target role.
Check the details from lesson 3.3, What to leave off a Singapore CV: no photo, NRIC number, date of birth, race, religion or marital status, no objective statement, no references line. If it runs over two pages, cut from the oldest roles first.
This version, with every bullet you have, becomes your master CV. Save it.
Pick one real job ad you would apply for. Using the routine from lesson 3.4, Tailor in fifteen minutes, not two hours, make a copy of the master, adjust the profile line, choose and reorder the bullets for this employer, and check the skills section against the ad. Save it with the company name and date in the file name.
Now find a reader, ideally someone who works in or near your target field. A former colleague, a friend in the industry or someone from your network all work. Give them the tailored CV, start a timer for thirty seconds and ask them to read it. Then take it away and ask: what role do you think I am applying for, and what do you remember about me?
Their answer tells you what your CV actually says, as opposed to what you meant it to say. When Wei Ling did this with a friend who works in a bank's operations team, the friend remembered the dashboard and the vendor savings, which was right. But she guessed Wei Ling wanted an operations manager role. The profile line was too focused on operations. Wei Ling moved "supply chain analytics" to the start of the line and the next reader got it straight away.
Fix whatever your reader missed, then, if you can, test it on a second person.
A finished result is two files: a master CV with every result bullet you have, in a plain single-column layout, and one tailored version of no more than two pages that a reader can identify correctly in thirty seconds. In the activity you finish both, run the test with a real reader and fix what they missed.
Finish your master CV and one tailored version, run the thirty-second test with a reader, and fix what they missed.
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