Don't waste your time, or mine

2014 has come around and it is no surprise to me that the Placement Office is busier than it was in the weeks immediately prior to Christmas. Whether it is a new year resolution to be more active in a search for a placement, or the penny has dropped that ideally they would like to be starting work in a matter of months, students who have gone AWOL since signing up in the early autumn have been coming out of the woodwork and wanting my help.

I don't mind this at all. It would be preferable to have been working with these students during the autumn so they could have applied for a number of roles already, but better now than the summer when opportunities will be in shorter supply. But when several months have already been lost in a search for a placement year, it is important for students to take heed of advice and act upon it without delay.

Something that is a huge frustration for me and fellow Placement Officers is when a student doesn't take our suggestions on board. I'm not big headed enough to think that everything I say is gospel, or that I have mastered the science behind writing applications. But I've been in this game long enough to offer sound advice and when I see things on a CV that require improvement, a student should take note.

Most do just that, but there are always a few who don't. Today was a case in point. Having sent detailed feedback to a student, which included some thoughts in the body of the email and tracked changes with comments in the word document, I received back a revised version and was asked if I could cast my eye over it again before applications were made. I was happy to do so and pleased that the ideas I put over in the email had been taken on board. However, on closer inspection, the changes I had tracked remained in their original form and had not been amended.

I don't pick holes in a CV just for the sake of it. No Placement Officer does. If we see something that needs attention before it reaches an employer we will tell you. We do this to give you a better chance of being invited for an interview, not to make your life more difficult. One of the things I pointed out in this particular example was it didn't look good to claim to have a good eye for detail on one line, while spelling Excel with 2 Ls on the line below. When this hasn't been corrected in a 'revised' version, please don't be surprised to find me lying on the Placement Office floor waiting for an ambulance to whisk me off for treatment for a violent case of banging my head against a wall.