Perfect your CV
Once you have familiarised yourself with the financial industry, it is important to get to know the application process. Landing a spring insight week, summer internship or graduate job in finance-related roles often follows a very similar process, one which you can learn and be better prepared for in maximising your chances of a job offer.
It is shocking to see how many applicants shoot themselves in the foot before they even begin the application process: not having a CV that is ready to submit. This is the single most important key to unlocking your future financial career! There are several steps to take in perfecting your CV: first, you need to make sure it is in the right format. To make life easier for you, we have attached an image of a CV template below which you will only need to copy and fill in with your details (file can be downloaded from https://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/free-investment-banking-resume-template/).
Before we get into the CV content, make sure that as you fill in your CV the grammar is perfect, a standard font is used (Times New Roman, Helvetica, Arial), proper and consistent use of punctuation (full stops at the end of sentences throughout), perfect alignment of text and margins (use gridlines in Microsoft Word) and check spelling at the end. Any content such as work experience should also be chronologically ordered from top to bottom. I cannot stress the importance of these factors enough, as failing to abide by these can ruin a good CV and lead to an immediate rejection.
CV Content
Your CV should begin with a couple of bullet points that highlights your key qualifications and experience this can be broken into education, work and leadership experience, and then skills, activities, qualifications and interests. Your education section should firstly contain the degree you are currently studying, your predicted grade and perhaps one or two relevant modules. You then list your A-Levels or equivalent (subject and grade achieved) followed by grades achieved at GCSEs or equivalent.
Work experience is by far the most important section, which entails detailing previous or current employer names with a brief description about company, the job title and time you held that position and finally the responsibilities you carried out and results you achieved during that work experience. Try and quantify your achievements as much as possible (i.e. I helped X start-up company grow Y%, I made A sales in B weeks, I managed Z clients...).
The final section is showing your skills without explicitly listing these, in order to show why you are a good fit for the position. Do NOT include proficiency at Word, PowerPoint and Excel as this is expected of you, only include coding (Java, Python, etc.) if you are at an advanced level and most importantly do not exaggerate your level of skill at a particular activity, language or interest.