Are you afraid of applying for jobs due to an inadequate CV? Do you think that your skills are not at the level where you can actually get the job you want? We’re here to tell you that there’s no need to worry!

All of these issues are more than fixable — starting from your CV. You just need to approach your coding CV from the right perspective. Don’t view this as a document — instead, look at it as your best chance to market yourself. After all, in most cases, your CV is the first impression you make with prospective employers. And we’re going to show you how to write the best possible tech CV right here!

Best Practices

As a junior web developer, you probably know some of the basic best practices in that industry — it may come as a surprise to you that some of those best practices are applicable to the process of writing a great CV as well.

For one — you need to keep it tidy. Remember how everyone hates parsing through messy code? It’s the same with CVs and employers. So, make sure you make efficient use of spaces to keep the content skimmable and not crammed together.

Also, utilise headings to ensure that your CV is well-structured. It’s not a bad idea to use italic and bold to highlight important parts as well. You need to be aware of one thing — recruiters won’t look at your CV in-depth. They just don’t have the time for it.

In fact, you may be stunned to learn that a recruiter looks at each resume for six seconds on average. A ton of CVs get discarded right away because they don’t catch the recruiter’s eye; you don’t want yours to be in that pile.

What you need are:

• Two pages max — though one would be ideal
• Short paragraphs
• Bullet lists (see what we did there?)
• Important information properly highlighted

The Best CV Structure

Okay, so we’ve taken a look at how you should approach your CV from the perspective of the content. However, you may still have qualms about the actual structure of the CV. Don’t worry — we’re going to lay that out as well!

Personal Information

The start of the CV should include any relevant personal details — your name, address, email, phone number, and Github. If it’s relevant, you should also include links to your social media as well, especially LinkedIn. Before you do this, clean up your Github; you may want to keep some repositories hidden, for instance.

Technical Skills

We’re arriving at the actual meat of your CV, which contains information actually valuable to employers. They’re not interested in you being a “team player”, because everyone is. Instead, showing off what you’ve actually learned so far is the most important bit.

As a junior developer, you probably don’t want to categorise your skills by level of expertise — realistically, you’re not an expert in pretty much anything, and no one really expects you to be. Be honest here; if you list any specific language, library, or framework, you should at least know the basics.

Even in interviews for junior developer positions, recruiters may demand a certain level of technical aptitude; don’t oversell yourself too much, if you don’t want the interview to be tough. If you think that you need to improve your knowledge on a specific subject before you apply for a position you want; that’s not the end of the day either!

Platforms like the Knoma Marketplace contain plenty of useful tech courses that can help you with upskilling before an important interview. You don’t have to spend half a year preparing for a junior developing position; you can just finish enough relevant courses to gain the requisite knowledge for getting your foot in the door — learning on the job will be easier from then on.

Experience and Education

You’ll find that many recruiters simply skim to this part of the CV; which is why it’s important to highlight your previous experience with the subject matter. If this is your first job, make sure to list any relevant education — even if it’s just a couple of coding courses. If you’ve worked on some code projects, that’s great as well; any experience and initiative will do you well here.

Again, honesty is extremely important here — when you’re applying for a junior developer position, you’re not expected to have a lot of technical experience. And “fake it till you make it” won’t do you much good here; knowledge isn’t easy to fake in technical positions.

If you don’t have a lot of experience, try to tie any experience you do have with the job that you’re applying for. Think about the skills employers value in programmers — like logical thinking and problem-solving. Have you demonstrated any of these skills in your previous work? That could be a useful addition to your CV.

Additional Information

Once you get the recruiter’s attention with your technical skills and previous experience, you should try to provide some additional information that separates you from the rest; something that will make you more memorable.

Include some “flair” from your personal life — interesting hobbies are your best bet. But if you can’t think of anything, just don’t include “listening to music”, “watching movies”, and other passive hobbies that just about everyone on the planet partakes in.

There’s no perfect CV

At the end of the day, you need to remember one thing — no CV is perfect, and your success in a job application depends on a wide variety of factors. Don’t obsess over this, and don’t be afraid to send out your CV to as many places as possible. Just develop your skills, follow our CV guidelines, and you should have no problem landing a great Junior Developer job!