We recently caught up with Bridgette Hernandez to discover how to write a killer cabin crew CV. This is what She said:.
''If you’re looking towards a career as cabin crew or hoping to switch airlines in 2022, now is the time to start preparing your CV.
To find the best candidates for cabin crew positions, airlines often organise cabin crew days every month or two. During these events, you can talk to the airline representatives, people who already work in cabin crew positions, and apply for such a job yourself.
However, if you are going to attend such an event, you will also have to face strong competition. Thus, you will need something that will represent you and your experience well and will put you ahead of all other job candidates.
Your CV can be your trump card in this situation, and today, we will take a look at a few tips that will help you write a CV that will highlight all your best qualities as a professional and will help you stand out.
1. Follow the Format
First of all, a good cabin crew CV should be comprehensive but also easy to browse. To achieve that effect, you need to follow a certain structure. You can try to position all the elements of your CV in the following order:
- Start with name and contact details at the top. Provide relevant details, such as the position you’re applying for, your location, phone number, and address.
- Proceed with a career objective. This component is usually considered optional, but it gives you an advantage over your competitors, as it gives a quick overview of your skills, experience, and abilities. With a career objective, your CV has more chances to be considered.
- List your work experience. If you’re applying for a position in a cabin crew, it is advisable to tailor your CV to that goal. However, if you’re just starting your career, list all the experience you have but try to make it relevant to the cabin crew position you’re applying for.
- Document your education. You can either include your full education or just a college or university education. Don’t forget to mention your specialisation and degrees.
- Include a comprehensive list of relevant skills. In this section, talk about your skills and the experiences that helped you gain them. It will add some credibility to your CV.
- Add hobbies, volunteering activities, etc. These parts are also optional, but if you have additional experience that can help you get ahead of your competitors, include it in your resume. However, think about how these experiences can be connected to a position in a cabin crew.
This is the standard format for a cabin crew CV. However, you can switch work experience and education, especially if you will be a new cabin crew member and don’t have any relevant experience in this field yet.
2. Personalise Your CV for Each Position
Now, let’s talk about how you can tweak your CV to make it stand out. The last thing you want your cabin crew CV to be is average, especially if you’re applying for a job at an airline where the recruitment process is very competitive.
One thing you can do is to personalise your CV for each cabin crew position you’re applying for.
For instance, many airlines are looking for certain characteristic features and abilities in cabin crew. You can tailor your CV to the employers demands by going through their job posting and picking the keywords that describe the features and abilities they’re interested in.
Claire Atkinson, a career coach and CV writing specialist at TrustMyPaper says, “you can do the same keyword search for particular cabin crew skills that an employer is looking for.”
One of the most common problems in all CVs, not just the ones intended for cabin crew positions, is that they are oftentimes too generalised.
But, if you tailor your CV to each employer’s demands, it will make your experience more relevant in their eyes, thus, giving you a considerable competitive advantage.
3. Add Transferable Skills
In your cabin crew CV, you will have to break down your skills into two categories – core skills and additional skills.
Core skills for a cabin crew member usually include:
- Customer service skills – greeting the passengers, dealing with their enquiries, and helping them during emergency situations.
- Communication skills – interacting with colleagues and passengers on a professional level, ensuring full understanding and rapport.
- The knowledge of health and safety – the ability to check the working condition of health and safety equipment, as well as detecting and preventing suspicious behaviour on board. First aid skills can also be added to this category.
- Sales and marketing skills – some airlines notify their cabin crew applicants that their task will be to promote products they will sell on board off the cart. If the job posting indicates this skill, you should also add it to your core skills list.
However, if you’re just starting your career as a cabin crew member, you might not have some of these core skills yet.
In this case, you should compose your skills list with some transferable skills that you’ve gained from your previous jobs and that are relevant to the cabin crew job position.
- For instance, the list of transferable skills for a cabin crew member might include:
- Basic communication skills – speaking, writing, listening, facilitating a discussion.
- Crisis management – identifying and handling a problem professionally.
- Interpersonal skills – developing rapport with people, cooperating, mentoring, delegating.
- Management skills – coordinating and planning tasks, managing groups of people.
- Organisational skills – punctuality, time management skills, accepting responsibility.
Even though you might not have the crucial cabin crew right skills away, transferable skills will be enough to build the initial version of your cabin crew CV.
But, both for core skills and transferable skills, make sure that you tie them with experiences that helped you gain them to add more credibility.
Start Working on Your Cabin Crew CV Now
Even though some airlines are not hiring at this minute, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start preparing. Writing a good CV will take you some time and a lot of revisions before you get the version that you would want to hand to your future employer.
To make sure that your CV stands out right away, make it well-structured and organised, personalise it to each employer and job posting, and work on the list of core and transferable skills.
The final result of your CV should look like one strong unit that represents you as a professional.”
If you would like more support carfting a CV that stands out to recruiters, access your free CV review here.
Who is Bridgette Hernandez?
Bridgette Hernandez is a professional writer and editor. She educates and trains professional dissertation writers as her main job and also volunteers as a career coach and resume writing expert at her local employment centre.
