Architecture CV simplified
Hey Friends,
As the application deadlines for architecture universities are approaching, I thought It’s a good time to share some tips on designing a good and standard architecture CV. So I made a YouTube video about both designing an architecture portfolio (watch from here) as well as another video about CV which will be available tomorrow from the channel.
For the past two years, I have had the privilege of teaching architecture students and graduates, design world-class standard portfolios and CVs and in this newsletter, I want to talk about 5 simple lessons that have completely changed their application and helped them to land amazing offers.
I have also designed a standard template which can be downloaded at the end, to help you understand the basics components and the structure of a good CV.
So let’s get started:
1. Never Send a CV alone
The first lesson is to never send a stand-alone CV.
your competitors will always stand out by showing their work and portfolio and employers who want to hire as soon as possible, will be much happier to look at an application which makes the decision-making easier by including a portfolio next to a CV than to look at someone’s stand alone CV which shows nothing about their actual capabilities and skills. So what you want to do is to include your CV right at the beginning of your portfolio right after the cover page.
This way the reviewer would get to know about you and your skills in the beginning and then see them in action in your portfolio. But bear in mind that you need to keep your portfolio file size very small and possibly not more than 10 megabytes and sometimes even less than 5 megabytes for some companies that ask.
2. Structure
The way you structure your CV has a tremendous impact on the clarity of your CV. You want to make your information easy to find on the page as the person who reviews your CV has probably reviewed tens of other CVs before you and will have to make time to review others after yours so he or she wants to get to the point and see if you can check all the boxes that they are looking for. So you want to make a couple of things stand out, your education, your experience and your skills.
The best possible format I have seen is dividing your page into 3 columns. In the first one you write about yourself and talk about your skills as well as your contact information.
The second and third columns can start with your education or your work experience, depending on the purpose of your application. If you are applying to study at a university you must show your educational background right after your first column and if you are applying for a job you must show your work experience at the top. Then below any of this information, you can highlight your awards, hobbies, your languages or any volunteering experience that you might want to mention.
3. Work Description
When you write down your work experiences, it’s important that you also write below the title, what you worked on during your experience and what did you learn in a very brief paragraph. Here you mainly want to show that you have worked on different types of projects and have carried out different tasks in opposes to doing the same thing all the time.
You want to show that you are able to use your skills to work on different projects and learn from them.
4. Tailor it
A very important task is to tailor your CV to the practice that you want to apply to work for. The majority of people get rejected because they don’t tick the boxes of that certain company. You need to be doing a job hunt and not a job search as your chances of ending up in a company that you think is going to add more value to you will be much higher if you do a job hunt vs being randomly accepted at a company that may not necessarily fulfil your growth potential in your industry.
A job hunt can be done in different ways for example one way is to tailor your CV to tick all the boxes of your potential employer. For example if you want to desperately work at Normal Fosters, you are more likely to be accepted if you have past experiences with Revit or if you want to get a job at Zaha Hadid architects your chances are much higher if you show you can use softwares like rhino and grasshopper.
You might not have past experiences on any of these programmes but sometimes by spending a week of self learning and watching youtube videos you can both learn and produce some amazing work to show in your portfolio and your CV.
This is generally very important for your future career as well because as soon as you start a new job, your next job will be highly influenced by your previous job in a sense that if you don’t have the right skills for a type of practice you want to work for, you might end up in a practice that you didn’t necessarily want to be working in and when you try to get a new job after a while, most of your offers will come from practices similar to your previous workplace and it can be difficult to find a completely different job at a different practice.
5. Communicating Skill Levels
This one is about how you visually demonstrate your level of expertise in the skills that you have highlighted. It’s trendy to use bars or points to show how much you are confident with each of those skills, but the bars and the points don’t really say anything. Most successful precedents that I had seen didn’t use bars and points and instead, they had written either beginner, intermediate, advanced or expert in front of their skills. Or some others had written the number of years of which they had been using the particular software or doing a hands-on type of skill like model making.
Employers usually prefer to see them in these two ways as it communicates the depth and the level of your skills better.
Download My Template
The template below is a simple structure of a CV which has helped other students to be accepted in some of the world’s leading architecture universities. You can modify the file in InDesign as you like.
I hope you have an amazing week ahead of you.
Amir xx
❤️My Favourite Things
📽️Youtube - 10 Rules for Designing Architecture Portfolio - I highly recommend watching this video to make sure you are covering all the important design rules in your portfolio and CV.
🍿Series - The Playlist - This new series is now in my watch list. The Playlist is about a Swedish tech entrepreneur and his partners set out to revolutionize the music industry with a streaming platform. (Spoiler: Spotify lol 😆)
📍Things to do - Cool Intimate Music in Secret Spots of your City! (London included) 😵 - So I discovered this event company which they do little musical events in intimate secret locations where you would probably have never been to. They have few concerts planned for Halloween so don’t miss the opportunity! (not sponsored I promise 😟)
🎥 My Youtube Video
The video about Architecture CV will be published on the channel as soon as tomorrow! If you haven’t yet subscribed then click here to do so that you don’t miss any of the videos published on weekly basis.