How to write the perfect Project Analyst CV
In today’s competitive job market, your CV needs to make an immediate impact. At Grayce, we want to give you the biggest opportunity to succeed and would like to provide you with all the guidance and support to start your career as a Project Analyst!
Whether you already have one, or are currently drafting your first CV since graduation, we are here to help you tailor your CV. Here are our top CV writing tips from the Grayce Talent Team to help you get noticed for the right reasons:
1. Keep it relevant
A well-tailored CV makes it much easier for us to recognise your experiences and pick out your transferable skills. While many ‘how-to guides’ advise that you place your most recent experience at the top of your CV, we feel that it’s much more effective for recent graduates to present their experiences in order of relevance. Bring maximum attention to your most relevant experience, providing less information on those that are less relatable to the role that you're applying for.
2. Highlight your achievements
In addition to organising your CV in order of relevance, you should also highlight the successes, achievements and impact your work has had during previous roles. At Grayce, our Talent Team are looking for evidence that you can really deliver! So, for example, if you came up with an innovative solution to a bottleneck in a process, presented this idea to company directors, who then implemented your idea, saving the company TIME and MONEY – we definitely want to hear about it!
3. Contextualise your skills
We love to see technical skills, soft skills, and additional qualifications on a CV. These are most commonly listed at the bottom, or down the side of a CV. However, along with a list of skills make sure you contextualise them in the body of the CV. It makes for easier reading, and we can better understand your unique skillset. For example, if you’ve used PowerBI, Tableau, MATLAB, or have any other technical skills that you feel may be relevant, tell us when, why, and how you used them!
4. Address employment gaps
You may have been previously advised to try and hide any employment gaps that you might have in your CV. This can be done by reshuffling your experiences or being intentionally vague when writing your employment start and end dates.
We would strongly advise against this. While it isn’t going to make or break your CV, we in the Talent Team are a curious bunch, and if we see something that doesn’t quite add up, we will ask you about it. So, if you took 6 months out to travel to South America, write about it in your CV. Tell us about the interesting experiences that you had! It shows us the reason you were out of work and allows us to process your application much quicker.
5. Make your CV readable
Whilst it’s really important to use technical language in your CV, if it contains too much technical jargon, it becomes incomprehensible. Remember, if you’re successful, part of your job may include engaging stakeholders. This won’t be done by bombarding them with technical jargon, but by simplifying complex information. Use technical words, phrases and abbreviations where appropriate, but offer bite-sized explanations, or provide the full term in brackets when used for the first time.
6. Hobbies and interests
By no means feel obliged to put this in your CV, but it is something that we do love to hear about - it makes you, YOU! What we don't want to see is that you ‘enjoy socialising with friends and watching TV’. We'd advise you to think about the things that you really enjoy. Whether it’s hiking, snowboarding, ultimate frisbee or learning Korean. Also, if you have any additional achievements that you’re particularly proud of, such as charity work or volunteering - please let us know.
We hope you've found our top tips useful and that you'll put them into practice for your application to one of our graduate programmes. The Grayce Change+ and Data+ Development Programmes are a three-year journey designed to shape graduates into future leaders, offering training, support and the opportunity to gain real experience working in change and transformation or data analysis. We look forward to reading your CVs and finding out more about you!