How to Create a Professional CV
Aminata Kamara
A good CV is short, specific, and easy to scan. A recruiter facing a stack of fifty applications spends about six seconds on each before deciding which pile it belongs in. Your CV has to survive that six-second glance and earn a longer read. This guide walks through each section in order and tells you exactly what to put in it and what to leave out.
1. The header
Keep it simple and professional: your name, a professional email address, your phone number, and your city. That is all. Skip your photo, your age, your marital status, and your religion unless an employer specifically asks for them. They take up valuable space, they can invite bias, and they tell the recruiter nothing about whether you can do the job. Make sure your email address sounds professional. "aminata.kamara@email.com" works. A nickname from secondary school does not.
2. A two-line summary
Right under your header, write two lines that say who you are and what value you bring. This is the first thing read, so make it count. Be concrete. "Junior web developer focused on clean, responsive websites. Built three live projects using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript." That tells a recruiter more than a paragraph of adjectives ever could. Avoid empty phrases like "motivated self-starter seeking opportunities." Everyone writes that, and it means nothing.
3. Skills
List real, specific skills, not vague claims about your personality. "JavaScript, Git, responsive design, Excel" is useful because each item is something a recruiter can test and a job advert can search for. "Hard-working team player with excellent communication" is filler that every single applicant writes, so it sets you apart from no one. If you can name it and prove it, list it. If it is just a personality claim, cut it.
4. Experience or projects
This is the heart of your CV. For each item, lead with the result, not the duty. The pattern that works is: a strong action verb, what you did, and the outcome with a number wherever possible. Numbers make you believable because they are specific and hard to fake.
- Built a small business website that brought in 12 new customers in its first month.
- Organised a community coding event with 40 attendees from three schools.
- Grew a social media page from 200 to 3,000 followers in four months.
No work experience? Use projects
A Projects section beats an empty Experience section every time. A website you built, an event you ran, a small business on WhatsApp, all of it counts as proof you can do the work. You can build that proof this weekend.
Free tool
The Teki-SL CV Builder formats all of this for you and exports a clean PDF. Use it instead of fighting with margins in a document editor.
5. Proofread twice, then once more
Typos cost interviews. A single careless mistake tells a recruiter you do not check your work, which is exactly the opposite of what you want them to think. Read your CV out loud, slowly, because your ear catches errors your eye skips over. Then ask one other person to read it, because you are blind to your own mistakes after the tenth read. And keep the whole thing to one page. A clean one-pager that a recruiter actually finishes beats a dense two-pager they abandon halfway down the first page.
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