Curriculum Vitae translates as "the path of life", although in actuality it's the path travelled that you want to mention. You probably won't bother highlighting the time you were an ice cream van driver for two weeks, before turning your vehicle over in a ditch and being rushed to hospital for an emergency Flake 99 extraction.

Technically speaking, a CV is more thorough than a resume, providing a full education history in every little detail, but these days, in practice the terms are interchangeable. Although a resume is, of course, more an American term, and this is a US product, but any Americanisms are kept to a minimum. For example, the interface caters for every country in its drop-down menus, so when it comes to writing your address, or noting down which national army you served under, a world of options are there.

Resume Builder divides the CV into sections, from basic biographical details to education, employment history, skills, licences and certificates, references and so on. Each category contains a number of titles which can be selected from a drop-down menu, so under employment history the user can not only specify his or her professional roles, but also an employment summary and work background.

All dated elements are automatically sorted into order, as you would expect, and basic formatting options such as bullet points are provided for your chunks of descriptive text, alongside a handy built-in spellchecker. This underlines any mistakes in red, thus avoiding any embarrassing errors in that department. The spellchecker accepts both US and UK variations as correct, so both 'color' and 'colour' are fine, although that could lead you into some slight trouble if you miss out the 'u' by accident.

Some advice on what to put on your CV is also imparted by Resume Builder. This ranges from obvious tips (don't put that you're involved with the Hell's Angels) to some genuinely handy snippets, such as when it's appropriate to add a "personal interests" section (the answer being that it generally isn't advisable or expected, unless there's something really compelling that relates directly to the job in hand).

Once done with the core resume content, the program lets you select from a number of different styles for the presentation of your document. There are 35 in total, including classic, modern and table style layouts, so there's plenty of choice and some interesting variations. Font types, background and line colours can be modified, so there's decent scope for customisation here.

The finished CV can be exported to Word or HTML, and indeed can be directly uploaded to an FTP site. Resume Builder is multilingual, as well, and can be used by French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese nationals, with all menus and text fully translated.

Verdict
A neat and easy to use multilingual CV builder, with plenty of different templates to play with, and some useful advice on hand.

Company: Sarm Software

Tags: curriculum vitae résumé html united states employment business resumes and portfolios business and economy