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Identify your Skills

In order to put together an effective CV, it’s important to first identify your skills, both soft skills and hard skills. Both of these can be well incorporated into your CV without seeming generic or boring. Instead of listing these out or trying to force every kind of keyword into your sentences, back up your statements with real experiences.
 
This is a good time to begin working on a CV if you don’t already have one. Don’t focus too much on the design just yet. Instead, give yourself a time constraint to include all the neccessary information you can think of and complete the exercise below on a piece of paper or text document. We’ll be discussing your CV in the 1:1 tutorials later today so be prepared!
 
notion image

Task 01

  1. Notable Skills
      2. Think about your most notable projects, skills, and extracurriculars relevant to your dream job.
  1. Notable Projects
      2. Identify 3 advocates that know your studio projects, and recognize your hard and soft skills. Write down those that can vouch for your talent. This could be a professor, a mentor,or a manager during an internship. Gather their contact information to reach out via email and ask for a recommendation in relation to a specific project.
      The earlier you do this the better!
  1. Notable Initiatives
      2. Have you taken part in or worked on some kind of design related initiative? This could be volunteering work, university society or even projects you’ve started yourself.
       
      👉🏼 Make a list of the skills you’ve learnt from all of these experiences. In order to not seem too generic, try and think of synonyms or explanations behind these skills. The best thing to do here is to use these skills in a sentence to describe a project or a time you showcased this particular skill. This will help later on in interviews.
 
💡 You can write all of this down in a Notion page, Google Doc or anywhere you can refer back to in the future

Examples of Skills and Core Values

Soft skills
  • Critical thinking
  • Problem solving
  • Creative iteration
  • Efficiency
  • Decision-making
  • Growth mindset
  • Active listening
  • Attention to detail
Technical skills
  • In-depth knowledge of X software
  • Y years experience in using X software
  • Rendering
  • Sketching (a.k.a Communication through design)
  • Model-making
  • File management
Core values
These are essentially values you believe to pride yourself on, ones that you can demonstrate on a daily basis and back up with examples. Try not to choose too many of these though.
  • Consistency
  • Dependability
  • Organisation
  • Efficiency
  • Independence
  • Perseverance
 
 
 
Previous:
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Unlocking Self Confidence
Next:
🛠️
Designing a CV
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