Creating a Functional CV
This style of CV highlights your main skills and strengths and does not place so much emphasis on who you worked for and what your job title was. The functional CV offers greater flexibility on how you present yourself than a chronological CV.
This style is useful when:
- You want to emphasise skills and strengths not necessarily acquired through paid employment.
- Your career to date consists of a number of jobs, most of which are unconnected.
- You want to change careers and therefore your present position may be of no relevance to your future ambitions.
- You want to emphasise skills and achievements from previous work experience which were not required in your most recent position.
- You are entering the jobs market after a break or for the first time.
- Most of your work has been freelance or you have worked on a number of temporary assignments.
- You are self employed and want to present to clients the range of areas in which you have experience.
- You have had a number of job titles, but the work has been basically the same. (Using this style avoids endless repetition of the same information.)
This style can be used when sending your CV on a speculative basis, as it gives a brief overview of the range of your skills, rather than simply emphasising what you have done in your most recent position. For this reason it is also useful when contacting agencies, who may wish to consider you for a number of positions.
