The difference between a CV for study and for work in Germany
The curriculum vitae (CV) is a summary of your career to date, including education, work experience and many other details. The person who will read your CV can thus get an initial overview of you as a person. That's why you should always submit your CV, whether it's for a course of study or for a job in Germany, in order to look professional.
Fortunately for you, CVs for work and study in Germany do not differ much. Later, when you need to submit a CV for a job application to a company, the spotlight will often be on your previous work experience.
In the case of a CV for a degree course, however, the focus is more on your educational background - understandable, since many students go straight to university after their A-levels and have not yet been able to gain much work experience. But if you have already gained some work experience, that's great! We will show you how you can best incorporate this into your CV.
Structure of a CV for a study application
Whoever asks you to submit a CV is talking about a tabular CV. Of course, you should not literally submit a CV in an Excel spreadsheet, but rather structure your contents neatly and one below the other. You can also add your CV to your Compounder profile here for future applications.
Upload your CV on your Compounder profile!Contents of a study CV
Only the most important content should be included in your CV! However, the following content points are mandatory in every CV:
Personal data
Most of the time, any personal data belongs on the top of the sheet. Although the recipients of your CV usually have your personal data such as e-mail address or telephone number already, there are generally several people involved in the application process, which is why this data should definitely be noted once again on your CV.
Your personal data worth mentioning include:
- Address
- Date of birth
- E-mail / mobile phone number
Tip: Your email address should be formal and neat and, if possible, only contain your name. If you have an older email address with a funny name, you can easily create a new email address. This is also useful to separate your private life from your work.
Educational background
In a conventional CV, you would now mark your work experience, but since your school-leaving qualification is more important in our case, you start with your educational background. You should list your work experience antichronologically in your CV for a university application. This means that your most recent experience should be at the top.
If you have completed your A-levels already, write the name of your school, type of school, the school location and your final grade.
If you completed an apprenticeship or even another course of study after graduating from school, this should of course also appear in your CV under "Educational background". Similar to your school-leaving certificate, you should list the institution, department, final grade and other relevant information.
Tip: A school-leaving certificate/study or training that you have dropped out of should always be mentioned instead of leaving a gap in your CV. It is also easier to explain than a gap in the CV, and is not a disgrace!
Professional experience
For the study CV, your work experience is usually less relevant than your educational background. Nevertheless, your work experience should be listed, unless you have no work experience, which is quite normal, as some high school graduates start their studies in the same year. Some work experiences you could mention are: student internship, voluntary internship, summer job, tutoring and many more.
Now, when you list your work experience for your study CV, you should always include more information about the jobs you have already worked at, including:
- Name of the company where you worked at,
- Location of the company (or remote),
- The period of time you worked, usually it is enough to give the months and not the exact start and end date
- Your role/what you did in the job - this is important! It is best to mention in a few key points which activities you were involved in on your working days. This will give the people looking at your CV more insight into what you can do and have already done.
Further information
By now, you have already included most of the information in your study CV, but some fine-tuning is still necessary. The following additional information serves as a nice extra for your CV. What you include ultimately depends on which degree programme you want to apply for, but the following should definitely be included:
- Your language skills - also state your language level. You can usually upload the certificates for your language skills in an attachment.
- Any voluntary work is always well received - it shows your commitment and that you do more than is expected of you.
- Your interests and hobbies: be sure to include what you do in your spare time. However, you should refrain from passive activities such as watching Netflix or gaming. List things that are either relevant to your desired degree programme or show that you are active. These could be activities such as reading, doing sports regularly, singing, etc.
- Your other skills: This includes things like software skills or a certain craft. For example, if you want to study graphic design and know how to use Photoshop or other image editing programmes, you can mention them here.
Designing your study CV
Now that you know what you want your CV to consist of, it's time to move on to the more important part, the design: the information about you should be nicely packaged and stand out positively. Whoever will be looking at your CV will most likely see dozens of CVs a day and in this situation, making your CV stand out positively is not even that difficult.
Choosing the right app
At the end of the day, it is always up to you which software you use to design your CV. For starters, a text programme that you may already be familiar with, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs (both are free when used in a browser), is suitable.
If you want and have some experience, you can also use a more image-oriented programme such as Photoshop or GIMP (which is free!). You can download it from the official GIMP site here). With this type of program, you will enjoy more freedom in designing compared to a text-based programme. Note, however, that it may be more difficult to adapt your CV afterwards.
In theory, you can now go ahead and insert it into the program of your choice following the structure mentioned in the previous paragraph - but wait!
As with many documents, there are templates and samples for CVs in all kinds of designs. This can save you a lot of time in formatting and other matters. Even if a design doesn't appeal to you, you can customise it to your liking. Templates are available for every programme and with a simple Google search you should find one that suits you.
Insider tip: to design a great CV, use the free online program Canva! It's the perfect mix of text-based editors (like Microsoft Word) and image editing (like Adobe Photoshop), plus it's very easy to use. On Canva, even for free users, there is an incredible amount of beautiful CV templates, which you can also sort by style - professional, creative and more.
Additional information for designing your CV
Once you have chosen a design for your CV, you should check again: does my design match my degree programme? For example, if you are applying for a marketing degree, you could use something more unique to emphasise your creativity.
Or if you are applying for a business degree, for example, you should probably choose a simpler and more professional design. The same applies to your application photo, if you use one.
No matter which design you use, one aspect is universal for all CVs: be sure to check for spelling mistakes!
With a spelling mistake in your CV you worsen your chances - an error-free CV shows a certain care and no one should claim that you have designed your CV just because you have to.
The same applies to mistakes of other kinds, such as unimportant information and exaggerations.
Other design choices are up to you, but make sure your CV is consistent - same font and size (for both text and headings), spacing and continuity. Don't make your CV look boring. In addition to text and images, you can also use simple icons to represent your interests and hobbies. You can find thousands of free icons on websites like Flaticon.
We also recommend that your CV should not be longer than one page. This will give the person reading your CV a good overview. If you have more than one page, you can make adjustments such as using a smaller font or leaving out unimportant information.
On the other hand, if you have problems stretching your CV over a whole page, that's not a problem either. Especially before you start university, you simply haven't gained enough experience yet. If this is the case, you can insert a small text of three to five sentences before your tabular CV in which you introduce yourself or make a reference to the university/college.
So far so good! We hope that these tips have given you more insight into how to write a CV for your studies. You can also upload your new CV to your Compounder profile!
Upload your CV on your Compounder profile!Compounder CV Template
If you still need some inspiration, you can download our CV template for Microsoft Word via the button below!
Compounder CV template to view and downloadComments (0)
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