Frontend Developer CV example

What recruiters expect

Before writing anything, it helps to know what the person reading is checking for. In this field that is usually a short, specific list:

• Demonstrable CSS skill: layout systems, container queries, design tokens, and a view on how to keep stylesheets maintainable.
• Accessibility beyond alt text - keyboard order, focus management, ARIA used sparingly, and testing with an actual screen reader.
• Core Web Vitals with numbers, and knowledge of what moves each metric.
• Cross-browser and cross-device work, including the awkward cases: Safari, low-end Android, reduced motion, dark mode.
• Comfort working from Figma with designers, including pushing back when a design will not hold up responsively.

Recommended CV structure

This is the running order the example uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule, but the order reflects what tends to be read first in this profession.

1. Profile — Three or four lines positioning you for the role.
2. Technical Skills — Grouped skills, for example "Languages" and "Tooling".
3. Professional Experience — Paid roles, in reverse chronological order.
4. Selected Work — Selected pieces with links.
5. Education — Degrees, diplomas and school-leaving qualifications.
6. Certifications — Completed certifications with the issuing body.
7. Languages — Spoken languages with CEFR levels.

Sections worth adding

• Side Projects — Useful when agency work is under NDA and cannot be shown.
• Community — Accessibility volunteering is directly relevant evidence here.

Skills worth including

Grouped rather than listed in one block. Grouping makes a long list readable and shows that you can tell the difference between the things you use daily and the things you have touched.

Beyond the technical list: Design collaboration, Client communication, Documentation, Running accessibility reviews, Estimating front-end work. These belong inside your experience bullets, demonstrated, rather than in a list of adjectives.

Example professional summary

Three or four lines, positioned for the role rather than describing your personality. Two versions you can adapt:

Front-end developer with five years across agency and in-house teams, focused on accessible, fast interfaces. Recent work includes taking a booking journey to WCAG 2.2 AA after an external audit and a performance programme that cut INP on the busiest page by two thirds.

Front-end developer with deep CSS and accessibility experience and a framework-agnostic approach. Comfortable in React and Svelte, more interested in whether the page works on a five-year-old phone.

Writing your experience

The difference between a CV that gets a call and one that does not is almost always in the bullet points. Each pair below shows a real rewrite of the kind of line that appears on most CVs in this field.

Taken from the example

The sample CV for this profession is fully written. A few sections from it, so you can see the level of specificity that works:

Experience

Senior Front-End Developer, Thistle & Pine Studio

• Lead front-end on public sector and charity projects, where accessibility is contractual rather than aspirational.
• Took a national charity booking journey to WCAG 2.2 AA after an external audit: keyboard traps in the modal, live-region validation announcements and a full retest with NVDA.
• Brought Interaction to Next Paint on the category page from 420ms to 130ms by removing a synchronous analytics script and deferring the filter widget until first interaction.
• Built the studio design system in Web Components so it could be dropped into three client stacks without a rewrite.

Education

• BA (Hons) Digital Design, Edinburgh Napier University — First Class Honours

Certifications and registration

• Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA) – in progress — IAAP

Common mistakes

ATS considerations

Applicant tracking systems behave differently by sector, and generic advice is often wrong for a given field. These points are specific to frontend developer applications:

• Include "front-end developer" with and without the hyphen somewhere in the document; adverts use both spellings.
• Spell out WCAG once as "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2)" so both forms match.
• Name at least one framework even on a framework-neutral CV, or you will fail keyword screens outright.
• Avoid representing skill level with dots or bars. They parse as nothing and read as arbitrary.

The Minimal ATS layout is built for this, and the ATS guide covers what parsers do to a file in more detail.

Guides that go deeper

This page applies general CV advice to one field. The full treatment of each part is here:

• How to Write a Software Developer CV — What technical reviewers look for, why the stack list is not enough, and how to write about work you cannot show.
• How to Describe Work Experience — The difference between listing duties and demonstrating impact, and a repeatable way to rewrite any weak bullet point.
• How to List Skills on a CV — Group them, be specific, and cut anything you would not want to be interviewed on for ten minutes.

Questions about frontend developer CVs