What do you have to do to get a job these days? Apparently, the exams you studied hard for in school aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, degrees are rapidly going the same way and you can’t get a job unless you already have five years experience, leaving you in a hideous Catch 22 predicament.

Luckily, there is a knack to writing a CV and it can be yours if you simply pay attention. 020 proudly presents the guide to creating the perfect CV:

Skills: Enlarge this section massively. By bluffing. Pretend you are an expert at all software packages mentioned in the job ad, even if you are still secretly baffled at the concept that pressing down on a keyboard can make small words appear on the screen in front of you. Once you’re safely installed in your new job, you can conceal your blatant ignorance by gazing at the screen in a puzzled fashion and saying, “Oh right, so you don’t have the updated version of this program? I’m afraid that’s the only one I’ve used” and, not only will they agree to train you in how to use it, they’ll also be under the impression that your computer skills are too advanced for their company when the truth is you don’t know a mouse from a modem.

Qualifications: Sex these up. Don’t include your swimming certificates, Year 7 exam results or that time you came top in a spelling test (by cheating). These expose you as desperate. Try to make the most of what you’ve got by not including your most execrable results and, above all, don’t give feeble excuses eg. ‘I got an F for Maths GCSE but I had contracted tuberculosis the previous weekend’. This will get you nowhere.

Interests: The key point is to make yourself sound much more interesting than you actually are. So, in this obligatory yet crushingly embarrassing section, substitute ‘reading, doing crosswords and going out with my friends’ with ‘rock-climbing’, ‘opera-singing’ and ‘bare-knuckle fighting’.

Do: be selective. Don’t mention the time you were in court over that regrettable incident involving the trainee policeman and a small, endangered amphibian. No-one needs to know.

Don’t: be afraid to stretch the truth. You were not a burger-flipper in a grotty fast food restaurant; you were a Michelin-starred gourmet meat juggler. You did not stand at traffic lights offering to wash cars; you were an automobile environment cleanser. Make it work for you.

Gap Year: everyone’s done one of these nowadays and it’s essential to include an account of your extreme and wild travels. Even if the furthest you got was Barnsley. Get an atlas, pick a tiny town in an obscure part of the world and pretend you spent a year living there in a small hut you fashioned out of driftwood. Beat these privileged, Prince William types who really could afford to travel at their own game.

Practice makes perfect. Start off tweaking your CV to swipe jobs in Sainsburys and MacDonalds and, once you’ve mastered that, it’s time to challenge yourself: go for that CEO job at Shell, become a United Nations Ambassador and – why not? – work your way up to snaffling the PM’s position. Weekend at Chequers anyone?