The Finnish 9th graders completed a project in which they first wrote a CV and a job application in English. They looked for actual jobs or came up with a dream summer job to apply for. The final part of the assignment was a job application video in which they videoed themselves answering questions, such as ‘Are you good at dealing with stress?’, ‘Do you get along with people easily?’ and ‘ What things are important to you in your future career?’

The goal of this exercise was to familiarize the students with the style of official documents and job hunting. Moreover, we wanted to make the students aware of their strengths and how to bring out the best in them when applying for jobs. We English teachers were very pleased with the students’ work and especially the videos surprised us positively. 

Here are some comments from the students:

We had to write an application and cv. We also had to make a cv video. We learnt to write an application and cv. We learnt how to present ourselves. Paavo thinks that this was an excellent school project and he would be happy to do it again. Veeti also was very excited about the project and recording himself. The hardest thing was to plan the project.

As a project we made a CV and a job application video for ERASMUS+. The CV wasn’t hard to make but the video was a bit more challenging because we had to record it and that made some people nervous. We wrote the CV to a google document and recorded the job application video with a webcam and sent it to our teacher.

We did a video interview, CV and a job application for our English class. Online school helped us because we didn’t have to film the videos at school but I think it still made all of us a little uncomfortable. Some had technical difficulties which made the filming hard. It was also quite annoying because a lot of us had to film the video over and over again because we kept messing up with our words. 

The positive thing about it was that we got to practice it because we will do this in the future and it was helpful and it taught us things. For example we learned to compliment ourselves and how to make a job application in English.