Task 1a - Professional Profile/CV First Draft

Task 1a - Professional Profile/CV - 1st Draft



Being a freelance artist means between contracts I work part time to support my everyday life, these jobs are not always related to the industry and I keep them on a separate CV.
My professional CV has a different layout to my work one and also a different style and feel, I will talk about these below.

My original performance CV was not created by myself, I graduated with an agent to help me into auditions and get jobs and the layout was specific to the agency. It was clean, easy to read and attractive and when I decided to not continue on with the agency I used theirs as a template to create my own. In the dance industry castings are usually done based on looks and personality, before you've even danced, If I'm at an audition and I'm number 357, alongside me are girls that share the same qualities, look and dress similar all going for the same job, so anything to help you stand out from the crowd is really important.

This is how my current CV looks today, a headshot can be attached separately from the credits but I like to include mine all together so there isn't more than one paper for a director to flick through. However sometimes casting directors like to see more than one image and maybe including a separate page of 2 to 3 different body/headshots would be helpful. I think my CV is organised and easy to differentiate between my details, work and skills. To improve this I would try different fonts to make the writing clearer, I also would change the colour theme to see if something else worked better.


Moving onto my work CV, this is a lot more basic in regards to layout, I didn't use any colour to separate the sections and made the layout in more of a 'letter' style. I did keep my headshot because most of the work I apply for has a model/character influence and I think it's important for an employer to see what you look like whilst applying, without sounding like the vainest person in the world.

I do think I can improve on this a lot more and have changed it a few times already, I'm unsure whether to include my GCSE's and college qualifications in more detail and whether to put my work experience into a table like my performance CV. My previous version was a few pages longer, with more detailed sections on my skills and included a personal statement. I changed it as I gained more experience as I felt the credits spoke for themselves and I didn't need to babble on.

             

I think I will take some important points from my old CV and include them in the rework of my new one to add more personality and engage the reader, I was reading the Evening Standard and an article on how to improve your CV came up. Niki Chesworth spoke about keeping your CV clean for an employer to read,

" With little time to scan each CV, recruiters do not want to see anything unnecessary on your application. Photos, jargon, hobbies, and outdated employment history and unnecessarily big words were cited as the most irrelevant, according to the CV-Library." Niki Chesworth, Evening Standard.