TEN GREAT WAYS TO MAKE A LOT OF MONEY continued...

PREPARING CURRICULUM VITAE

A curriculum vitae is nothing more than the biographical details, both personal and career related, of persons wishing to change jobs or seek advancement, training, and virtually any other change within their working lives, which necessitates them giving interviewers, employers, and college heads, sufficient details to make a full and accurate assessment of the candidate.

At one time the humble application form was the order of the day requiring one to neatly present personal data in little boxes on the employer's, or whoever's individual forms.

Forms presented several problems, not the least being that their designer, who like the rest of us are not infallible, often asked ambiguous questions, or else allowed no space on the form for the inclusion of information which those labouring over it considered of vital importance. In the latter case the astute applicant would add a typed or hand-written addendum to the form before submission. On too many occasions though, even the experienced applicant could be left with that niggling feeling of, albeit inadvertently, answering a question 'not quite adequately' or wishing that extra space had been available to include more detailed information. Here the curriculum vitae comes to the rescue, offering the candidate the facility to include in the application, all of those details which he and the intended recipient feel necessary for a fair assessment to be made. It contains therefore all of the information required on a standard application form and those additional points peculiar to the individual applicant. But how does the inexperienced applicant or those with insufficient time or inadequate facilities, go about the task of preparing this rather ostentatiously named document in a neat, orderly and professional manner? The answer is - they don't! They get someone more experienced to prepare the document on their behalf! This service, much needed in today's competitive job and education markets, has led t the emergence of many specialist 'C V' enterprises. Fees range from £25 to £40 and more, and all for what essentially amounts to handing over a few copies of a short document.

Some offer the document in a 'designer' folder, often with the customer's name gold-leafed on the front. 'Very nice' you might think and yes it is - also very expensive, and to my mind unnecessary. The documents will not be forwarded to the employer in their glamorous cases, and surely, the more costs are kept to a minimum, whilst still providing a reliable and accurate service, the more competitive will be the price asked of the customer and the more customers will thereby be attracted. The person who decides to enter this lucrative business must of necessity have two prime qualifications: an ability to put his or her customers at ease as personal details are elicited as fully and accurately as is possible, and, access to a good typewriter or if possible one of the most ingenious and invaluable inventions of our time, a word processor. The document must be presented in typewritten form, but whereas even the most accurate of typists, working with the best of typewriters, will inevitably be tempted to cover up one or two odd mistakes with that old favourite 'The Corrector Fluid', a word processor allows all errors and amendments to be made before the document ever appears in print. The end result is professional, and in the vast majority of cases, completely free of typing and spelling errors.

PREPARING CURRICULUM VITAE
RESEARCHING FAMILY TREES
YOU NAME IT
INVENT-A-GAME
CHERISHED CAR NUMBERS
WHEN WORDS ARE SIMPLY NOT ENOUGH
HOW TO DO THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER
COME AND JOIN US
LIST SELLING
GIMMICKS AND SEASONAL ITEMS