NEFS CV Example

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in the United Kingdom, NEFS is a global leader in financial software and data analytics, revolutionising fintech solutions that streamline operations and enhance decision-making. It operates in the technology and finance industries.

After reading this article, you'll be equipped with all the tools to produce a winning CV that impresses NEFS hiring managers, and identifies you as a suitable fit for the role. Acting on the advice in this guide will boost your chances of your CV ranking highly in the ATS screening stage, and improve your chance of gaining an interview at NEFS. Next, we’ll go through the key sections of a CV and explain how to write them strategically.

Key sections of a NEFS CV

How you approach writing your NEFS CV will vary according to your experience, your level and the details outlined in the job description.

However, regardless of your years of experience, a NEFS CV needs to connect the dots of your career into a cohesive story. In the following sections, we’ll dive into the specific chapters of your CV step-by-step, showing you how to refine everything from your initial introduction to your long-term achievements.

CV Header

Start your NEFS CV with a professional-looking header that includes all the relevant contact information. This usually includes your name, your email address, your phone number and your location, but not your full address. Additionally, add your LinkedIn profile, if this is in use and up-to-date. A well-utilised LinkedIn profile can give further information to the reader about your skills, experience, industry knowledge and career achievements.

For jobs in the UK, a personal photo is usually not required on your CV. That, along with any other personal details such as age, gender, ethnicity and nationality, are generally discouraged under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, which aims to reduce and eliminate discriminatory practices, such as recruitment bias.

CV Objective

Underneath your contact information, write a brief CV summary or CV objective to introduce yourself and highlight a few key skills and qualities. This can help the employer to quickly form a first impression on your suitability for the NEFS officer role. The CV objective provides an alternative to the standard CV summary. While the CV summary focuses on your skills and achievements through your work experience, a CV objective highlights your ambitions and plans for the future, including how the role fits with these. This makes it ideal for junior candidates.

Both a CV summary and objective should be concise, with an ideal length of two or three sentences. List your key skills, personal strengths and career achievements or ambitions, taking care to ensure the content reflects the requirements listed in the job description.

A good CV summary will highlight one or two key skills that match those listed in the job description, and show how you've put them to good use in your career to date. You'll want to set yourself apart from other candidates by focusing on unique qualities or particular areas of strength that have shaped your career to date. See below for an example of a strong NEFS CV summary, featuring quantifiable evidence of your impact and concise, easy-to-read sentences.

Above is an example of CV summary that doesn't follow best practice, with some subtle shortcomings and failings. Your summary could miss the mark if it's too generic and doesn't describe unique personal qualities and strengths. It might also be vague, use long, unstructured sentences, lack quantifiable evidence of your impact, or not be tailored to the job description.

Employment History

In your work experience section, it's essential to show any relevant previous employment in the transport and logistics industry. Study the job description and include skills and achievements that reflect the key requirements listed, and that will resonate with NEFS recruiters, showing how you can do a good job for their organisation. List your previous relevant transport and logistics industry jobs in reverse-chronological order, starting with your present position or most recent relevant job. Include your job title, the name of the employer, its location and your dates of employment. For each entry, list a few bullet points describing your key skills and achievements in the role.

A positive CV will focus on relevant previous roles in the industry, and provide evidence of how you've used key skills for the transport and logistics sector to produce positive outcomes in your career to date.

An unsuccessful work experience section may focus on jobs that aren't related to the transport and logistics sector, or that don't offer any evidence to support claims of relevant industry skills and experience.

Education and Qualifications

In your education section you'll want to list your highest and most recent qualifications, particularly if they're a requirement for the role.

To work as a NEFS officer, it's not necessary to have a specific degree. However, while a degree isn't usually requested in the job description, it can be useful to include other relevant qualifications in your CV's education section. These might include Certified Emergency Manager, or other courses that show your hard skills, such as explosive device risk assessment or forensic laboratory sample analysis.

When creating your education section, think about which qualifications are most relevant to the role, and list them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working back from there. For each entry, include the name and level of the degree or certification, the institution, its location and your graduation date or dates of study. To emphasise your qualifications and achievements, you might wish to include one or two bullet points, which highlight things like specialist areas of study, projects, dissertations or society memberships.

You might also wish to add specialist qualifications, certifications or licences that are required for the role. If you add any of these, include the expiry date, if the qualification requires renewal in the future.

Key Skills

In your CV's skills section, you'll want to draw attention to some of your strongest skills that make you suitable for the role. Review the job description to get an idea of the most essential skills, and create a list of hard and soft skills, including some of your strongest, most unique qualities that set you apart from other candidates. In a NEFS CV, only list the most relevant and essential skills you possess, such as leadership and crime scene digital photography, to make a positive first impression and show you're qualified for the NEFS officer position.

Hard Skills

Hard skills are the specialist technical skills that are essential for carrying out the duties of the role. They might be developed through study, on-the-job training or experience in the industry, and some hard skills may require a licence or certification. For NEFS officer jobs, critical hard skills you've gained in your career can include crime scene digital photography, and forensic laboratory sample analysis. After reviewing the job description, compile a list of four or five key hard skills for your NEFS CV to show you're capable of carrying out the duties required for the role.

You'll want to include a list of hard skills that closely matches the skills listed as 'essential' or 'desirable' in the job description, while also reflecting your own strongest technical skills.

The following section highlights skills that are commonly listed under hard skills in a NEFS CV:

Soft Skills

Soft skills are distinct from hard skills and tend to reflect your inherent personal qualities and strengths. These are often more transferable to different roles, and help the reader understand your working style, and your likely fit to the team and the organisational culture. Transferable skills are among the most in-demand skills for employers, with rapidly changing and evolving ways of working requiring ever-more flexible and adaptable employees. Soft skills are also highly valuable for junior and entry-level positions, where candidates aren't expected to have a wealth of relevant work experience and career achievements.

Adopt the same approach as you did with your hard skills list, reviewing the job description to understand the requirements, before assessing which soft skills you can provide evidence for throughout your NEFS CV. Create a list of four or five transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with the skills that help you to stand out as a unique and compelling candidate for the position.

Explore the examples below to identify soft skills commonly presented in a NEFS CV.

Languages

If you speak any languages in addition to your mother tongue, you might want to include them in your NEFS CV as a languages section. These can be valuable for your application, whether languages are specified as a requirement in the job description or not. In this section, include any foreign languages you speak to a standard that could be useful in the world of work, with an indication of your proficiency level.

The methods for indicating your foreign language skills on your CV include assigning a basic descriptive word, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

You might wish to use an internationally recognised standard for your language skills, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This divides your language skills into the following categories:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Certifications and Training

To showcase additional qualifications and training beyond the basic requirements for the role, consider adding a certifications section to your CV. It can enhance your chances of success to show specific training and certifications. Not only do these prove you're qualified for the role, but they also indicate proactivity and a dedication to professional development. Furthermore, a certifications section is particularly valuable if you're applying for a role that sets out required certifications or licences in the job description. These might include technical roles that require the use of specialist software or equipment.

These example certifications and licences are ideal for candidates applying for NEFS officer roles:

Optional Sections

Optional sections can be useful to add to your CV, to provide additional evidence that you have the skills for the NEFS officer job. Consider adding optional sections if you're unable to show all the necessary skills for the job through work experience, but could show them through extracurricular activities and other areas of life. This could be especially relevant if you're a junior candidate, or if you're changing careers.

If you're curious about other ways to make your CV more effective, our career resources will help you strengthen your application.

Hobbies and Interests

Hobbies and interests are a legitimate way to showcase your skills, if you have any hobbies relevant to the role. In addition, this section is the ideal way to show aspects of your personality that might not otherwise shine through in your CV, helping to offer a point of difference compared to other candidates. However, a hobbies and interests section is only valuable if it helps you to show relevant skills you've been unable to evidence in other parts of your CV. If your hobbies and interests are unrelated to the job, it's best to leave them off your CV.

Career Achievements

Creating a list of your key career achievements can be an effective way of drawing attention to the things you're most proud of from your career. If you've won any awards or achieved any key milestones in your career to date, you might want to mention them here.

Volunteering

Listing any previous voluntary work is another useful way of showing you have the necessary skills and experience for the job. If you don't have much relevant work experience, either because you're a junior candidate or you're changing jobs from an unrelated field, volunteering can provide valuable examples of your skills in action. For this section, use a similar structure to your work experience section.

List your job title or a description of the role, the organisation name, its location and the dates you occupied the role. Use bullet points to show employers how you put your skills to use, and any positive achievements from your time in the role.

References

References aren't usually required on a UK CV, so leave them out in most cases. However, it's always worth checking the job advert and being ready to include them if requested. If you need to add them to your CV, include two or three references, adding their name, job title, organisation and contact details.

Be sure to ask their permission before you include anyone as a reference in your NEFS CV. Alternatively, you could simply add a line to your CV indicating you can provide references when necessary, such as 'references are available upon request'.

Top action words to use in a NEFS CV

Adding strong action verbs to the bullet points in your CV's work experience section is a great way to focus on the key skills required for the job, while showing the impact you've made. Start each bullet point with an action word that reflects the job description, so the reader can easily identify your best qualities. Remember, it's essential to evidence any action verbs you add to your work experience. This will help show your achievements and the impact you made in previous roles. Use past tense for action verbs that describe previous roles, and present tense for your current position.

NEFS CV sample

Now that we've covered the main sections to include in your NEFS CV, we can see how it would all come together in its final form in the example below:

To get an idea of how your completed, one-page CV will look once its been fully designed, see our selection of CV examples.

Guide to making your CV ATS compatible

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are a valuable tool for many recruiters and employers, helping them manage the recruitment process by scanning and assessing CVs based on their likely fit to the job description. By taking on this task, the systems can save hiring managers the time and effort of reviewing every CV in detail. With vacancies regularly receiving hundreds of applications, this can increase the efficiency of the recruitment process.

The growing prevalence of ATS apps requires a shift in approach by jobseekers, to prepare a CV with the best chance of passing the ATS screening stage. That's why we've put together a list of key ATS CV tips, to maximise your chances of success:

• Include keywords and phrases from the job description that are easy for ATS apps to identify, and help make you appear a strong fit for the role.
• Use clear, conventional CV headings to make your CV easier to navigate, including 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Choose a simple, standard CV structure and omit any design elements that might make your CV less easy to read by automated systems, such as text boxes and columns.
• Select a widely-used font in either serif or sans serif style, with a font size between 10 and 12 for body text and 14 and 16 for heading text.
• Use bullet points in place of full sentences and paragraphs, as these are easier for ATS apps to scan and parse, and help your keywords stand out.

It might seem like there's a lot to remember when it comes to making an ATS-compatible CV, but taking care with this stage can really improve your chances of success. To make the process as easy as possible, use one of our expert-designed, ATS-optimised CV templates and boost your chances of success.

Key takeaways for an impactful NEFS CV

To stand out from the crowd with your CV, tailor your approach to each individual application, incorporating keywords and phrases that match the job description. Use a CV format that reflects your experience levels, and emphasise your skills and achievements throughout your CV, to show employers you've got the required skills and experience for the job.

Finally, building your CV using Jobseeker's HR-approved CV templates can help to catch the eye of recruiters and hiring managers, making your application stand out and giving you the best chance of gaining your dream job.

Sources:

1. Transport for London (TfL), Writing a CV and cover letter
2. Jobseeker, Hiring Trends