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An employment survey makes interesting reading as it covers the reasons cited by employees for staying in their current job and what it would take to make them move to a new position.

In the third annual survey of its kind, inadequate compensation was the most popular reason for leaving a job.

Other reasons for leaving included, lack of career advancement, insufficient recognition, inadequate professional development and boredom.

As for why people want to stay in their jobs, the top reasons were good relationships between coworkers, desirable working hours and attractive benefits.

Employees are much more ready to look for new positions but require more compensation than employers believe. 50% of employers believed a salary increase of 8-15% was enough for an employee to move but only 31% of employee said that this would be the case but for 38% employees it would take a increase of 15-30% before they would move to a new position and 17% said the increase would have to be even larger than 30%.

Dispite this loyalty, the amount that employers would offer in a pay increase to retain a member of staff was willing to offer was just 7%. Only half of employers sometime make an offer to retain staff, while 35% say they never do. Quite surprising considering the cost of finding a replacement member of staff is more than £13,000.

In the second of this series of CV tips we look at the what you should include on your CV. Primarily, the CV is a summary of your achievements used to market yourself to your next potential employer. Keep this in mind. Employers just need to know the relevent facts that make you suitable for the position  not your life story.  What you need to include also depends on your level of work experience and how long you have been working in your current position.

Most important is your contact information. This can be your mobile telephone number and email address. On written CVs you should also include your address. It can also be good to include a link to your a Linkedin account, if you have one.

Personal Profile – one or two  sentences summarising your career. For example: “Investment banker with 3 years in aquisitions and mergers.”

Key Skills – this section should show that you can do the job and are everything the employer is looking for. These can be grouped either by theme, e.g.  HR, Computer Skill, Administration, office management, etc.

There are many companies out there that will charge you to look over your CV but they are not really necessary. However you have written your CV there are some simple ways in which you can make changes that will make a difference.

CVs come in three basic types:

Reverse Chronological – this starts with your most recent experience and works back through time. This type of CV is good if you have a lot of experience.

Skill Based – instead of listing what you have done, this CV tell the employer what skills you have an your level of competance with these skills. Better for university leavers without a lot of work experience.This is also useful for people that are making a jump to a different career.

Hybrid – a combination of both types. Useful for someone moving positions within the same sector. It should list your previous work history and list the key skills that you have that are relevant to the job.

Writing your CV is the one chance you get to impress when applying for a job. Don’t mess it up by  being flippant. These are genuine quotes from CV that were received for various positions:

• “I have lurnt Word 2007 computor and spreasheet progroms.”
• “I am loyal to my employer at all costs…Please feel free to respond to my resume on my office voice mail.”
• “Reason for leaving last job: they insisted that all employees get to work by 8:45 am every morning. I couldn’t work under those conditions.”
• “References: none. I’ve left a path of destruction behind me.”
• “I have an excellent track record, although I am not a horse.”
• “Wholly responsible for two (2) failed financial institutions.”

You need to have some common sense when filling out your CV.

In the current economic climate, the prospects for a finding a job are not good. The level of unemployment lags behind that of the prospects of the rest of the economy. With the UK starting its tentative recovery process, the number of people seeking work is still increasing.

In these times, people looking for work are forced to consider jobs tha they would not otherwise take.  This puts increased pressure on those that the least able to help themselves. The poorly educated and those in debt. We are seeing employers use this situation, with an increased number of internships where people are willing to work for little or no wages just at the potential prospect of having a job in the future.

It is very poor situation for job seekers that will take some time to improve.

There are no hard and fast rules to writing a CV but there are some commonsense guidelines that can help. Let’s take a moment to go through some of the important points to remember when writing a CV.

The first is that it should be to the point. When a job vacancy is issued, there are usually many applications and to stand a chance of being seen you must sell yourself to the employer as effectively as possible. The first way in which this can be done is to be consice. If your CV is more than 2-pages long then it is probably too long.

Update and modify your CV according to the job you are applying for. Many people write a CV and either leave it to become outdated or include lots of irrelavent information. If you are applying for a good which requires certain skills that you have then write your CV in such a way as to emphases these skills. Extra talents are good but for every job there are a set of essential skills which must be met first.

To tailor your CV to a particular job, look at the requirements and try to include something in your CV that reflects these requirements to the employer.

It is all too obvious to say  that you should check your spelling and grammar at least twice when sending a CV but it never fails to amaze me that people do not bother. As this is the first chance to make an impression it is vital that you make a good one otherwise there won’t be another chance. Pay particular attention to the spelling of Curriculum Vitae. That is often spelt incorrectly.

If you have to post a CV, use a first class stamp. It is often an unmentioned way of quickly weeding out candidates. It is harsh but reflects the attitude of the candidate to the job.

The web is great place to improve one’s self, either by studying a something new or finding out about your interests. However, there are so many sites full of dross and many of them come under the heading of self-help.

Type ‘self improvement’ into a search engine and you will find thousands of results but then look at the quality of the pages. There is nothing. Most of the sites are so called ‘Made for Adsense’( MFA) sites with scarcely any content but many hundreds of adverts designed to make money from the clicks of the unwary.  If you were to take a sentence from one of these sites and search the chances are that it would be on many other sites.

Is this what self-help is about these days? Help yourself make money by making useless spammy websites. There is a lot of good information on the web but it is not found through self-help websites.  Help yourself, go and get an education.

I am very skeptical about the value of self-improvement. I see it as another branch of the charlaton network that encompasses the psyics, work-from-home spammers and diet pill vendors. All these people make massive claims that are never realised. They make money, you lose out. My biggest and most valuable piece of advice is steer clear of people claiming to offer self-improvement quick fixes. There are no shortcuts and if you need to seek  a quick fix solution then you are probably a loser that is beyond hope. If you are the kind of person that has an idea of where they are going and what they need to get there then you don’t need self-help advice.