CV Tips for Co-ops
The Mech Bros team is highly experienced professionally and academically. We think it is our duty to pass on our experiences through our services.
We know many first year engineering students are looking for Fall Internships during the summer. We are here to share our advice for the job search, starting by CV tips and tricks:
Template or your own design? A very detailed CV template can be downloaded from your Co-op job portal. This template will need to be modified based on your degree (for example, you don’t need all the programming languages field your a building engineering student).
From our experience, we recommend you build and use your own template if you’re applying on your university's job portal. Employers looking at CVs from the Job Portal typically print them out instead of doing online filtering. Imagine your CV blending in with 30 other students who applied who applied using the same template. This ruins your chances of standing out. A new design should only be used if it is clean, simple and organizes your information more efficiently than a pref-defined template.
1 or 2 page?
We recommend 1 page CV unless you clearly have lots of experience to present then go for two pages. NEVER do 1.5 page CV. Employers are bombarded with CVs and may not even look at the second page. This is where you might want to use your own template and modify margins, stack your skills in columns and etc.
Organization of contents
Now if we try to aim for one page, how should the contents be organized?
Start off by you’re education. Followed by skills/software/languages. This should be concise and should not take too much space. what you really want to show case is your experience not what operating systems you know how to use. In fact no need to even put that since we live in 2017 and you would be considered primitive to not know Windows, Microsoft Office, Mac Os etc.
As a first year engineering student, you probably don’t have much valuable work experience to show off. In this case we recommend putting your engineering projects in lieu of work experience. Projects can vary from Cegep projects to projects in your first year courses that demonstrated you implemented engineering knowledge that you acquired. Additionally include any school involvement or volunteer opportunities here. Things like being part of SAE, UAV or University clubs should be listed.
After your projects, you can mention work experience. Normally you only put work experience after projects if your experience consists of random part-time jobs. If you feel your past work experience adds value to the position you are applying to then put it ahead of the engineering projects. Finally, if you still have space left, finish off by stating your hobbies, interests and awards.
Most of the tips are given from one of our cofounder who has had successful internships including working at Tesla in California.
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NOTE: All information and advice presented here is from the experience of our successful alumni. This may or may not reflect with you have been told from your university staff. This unique advice has personally led us to successful interviews and job opportunities, hence why we are sharing our knowledge.
