An internship is often the first step in an exciting new career path. Helping new school leavers, undergraduates and recent graduates to get their foot on the ladder, internships provide invaluable opportunities and the potential to make money-can’t-buy connections in your chosen industry. Of course, that means that competition for internships is fierce. In order to stand out from the crowd and claim your seat at the interview table, you need to impress from the get-go. And it all starts with a great CV.

Follow our step by step guide and we’ll show you what to do, and what not to do, to help you craft the perfect CV.

Write your profile
All good CVs start with a punchy, compelling opening paragraph. This is known as your profile. The profile paragraph should sum you up, and explain why you’d be perfect for the internship you’re applying for.

When applying for internships, this is a good place to add information about your career aspirations and explain why it’s this internship in particular that you dream of. Tailor your profile to the organisation and role you’re applying for each time to ensure that you get noticed.

Talk skills
Once you have the reader’s attention, you’ll want to go into more detail about what makes you perfect for the internship in question. Summarise your skills, and include examples of how you’ve demonstrated these skills in a work or study environment previously. For example, if you want to tell your reader that you’re a great team player, you might choose to highlight an event that you helped manage as a team, or a competition in which your group triumphed.

Add your experience
Experience often makes up the lion’s share of a CV, but as an internship applicant, you are unlikely to have huge amounts of relevant work experience to talk about. That’s not a problem, and employers will be fully aware that applicants for these roles won’t usually possess years of experience in the industry. Instead, use this space to talk briefly about any other work experience you might have had.

You could highlight summer jobs, or any part-time work you undertook while studying. Even if these roles don’t seem immediately relevant, you should still be able to find some transferable skills to talk about in this section. Think about skills like communication, time management, delegation and problem solving to get started.

Discuss your education
If you’ve spent the past few years studying hard for a degree or another qualification, or you achieved knockout grades in your A Levels, you should include this here. You won’t be expected to go into huge amounts of detail about your studies. A simple list of schools and universities with the qualifications and grades achieved will suffice.

Inject some personality
When applying for a new role, it’s essential that you build a rapport with your interviewer and get them thinking about how you might fit into their team. That’s why it’s a good idea to add some snippets of information about your interests to your CV, below the education section. This gives an interviewer more of an insight into you as a person, and can help them to get the conversation going and put your nerves at rest in the interview room. What you choose to talk about is entirely up to you, but ideas might include interests in films, music, sports, events, hobbies or travel.

End with your references
If you make it through the interview and are being considered for the role, it’s very likely that your interviewer will want to see some references. For this reason, CVs tend to end with “references available upon request.” You don’t need to list the contact details of your referees, but it’s a good idea to have someone in mind when asked. For internships, you could ask previous bosses, lecturers or teachers to serve as a referee.

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Putting pen to paper and writing a snappy, imaginative CV that captures the imagination of your reader is no mean feat. However, if you follow the correct structure and add touches of personality throughout, you should have no trouble putting together an internship CV that stands out from the competition. Then it’s just a case of preparing for the next step… the interview!