CV advice for redundancy, breaks and career changes

Most career advice is written for a career, not for a Tuesday. You are not looking for a philosophy of work. Your contract ends in six weeks, or you have been out of work for three years, or you have been applying since January and heard nothing at all. The four guides in this section each start from one of those facts and end with wording you can put on a CV. Every one of them shows the same job written twice, badly and then answering an advert. None of them asks you to reinvent yourself, and none of them will tell you to follow your passion.

Each guide is built around one situation and one rewrite you can read.

• Changing direction. Every date, employer and job title stays exactly where it is. The example takes a care assistant's role and retypes it against an outpatient booking coordinator advert, adding nothing.
• After redundancy. Most CVs do not need to mention it at all. The example cuts a defensive paragraph down to a short clause beside the end date, then puts the evidence back underneath.
• After a career break. The gap gets a dated entry and a category, which is a different question from the reason. The example is a management accountant's history with three years opened up rather than papered over.
• Applying and hearing nothing. Silence has five separate causes. That guide runs them in the order that costs least to check, and ends with one adviser role written twice, once answering the advert's three essential criteria and once not.

If more than one of those fits you, start with the silence. Why am I applying for jobs but not getting interviews is the only page here that tells you not to rewrite anything yet. Two of its five causes take ten minutes to rule out, and a weekend spent on the CV is wasted if the attachment never opened in the first place.

If you already know what changed, go to the matching guide directly. A finished fixed-term contract belongs in the redundancy guide even though nobody used the word. Three years at home belongs in the career break guide.

Then put the CV you actually have in front of the CV review with one advert beside it, so you find out which of that guide's points land on your version rather than on a written one.

Advice can tell you what a good line looks like. It cannot tell you which of your lines are weak, because it has never read them. That is the split, and it is why each of these guides ends by handing you back to the product.

Career Auntie's CV review reads your CV against one specific advert and returns between five and fifteen findings. Each one quotes the phrase that triggered it and carries a severity. There is no score and no percentage match, because neither could be calculated honestly. Where a finding needs a fact only you hold, it can become a direct question, and your answer feeds the rewrite.

A review costs one credit, out of five free credits a month.