How to Write a CV

The sections a CV needs

A CV needs fewer sections than most people put on one. The following five cover the great majority of applications, and anything beyond them should earn its place:

• Personal details — name, phone, email, and the city you live in. Not your full address, not your date of birth, not your marital status.
• Professional summary — three or four lines positioning you for this role. Optional, but useful once you have a few years of experience.
• Work experience — reverse chronological, most recent first, with achievements rather than duties.
• Education — degree, institution, dates, and classification if it helps you.
• Skills — grouped, specific, and honest.

Choosing a format

There are three arrangements in general use, and for most people the choice is already made.

Reverse chronological lists your roles newest first, with dates. It is what a reader expects, it is what applicant tracking software is built to parse, and it is the right answer unless you have a specific reason for one of the others.

Functional, sometimes called skills-based, groups your experience under headings like "Project delivery" or "Client management" and pushes the employment history to a short list at the end. It is usually recommended to people with gaps or a career change, and it usually works against them. A reader who cannot tell which job a particular achievement happened in will assume the arrangement is hiding something, and will start looking for what. If you have a gap, a one-line explanation in a chronological history costs you less than a format that draws attention to it.

Combined keeps the reverse-chronological history but opens with a short skills block above it. This is a reasonable choice when the toolkit is the first filter — most technical roles — and it is the only one of the three variations that does not cost you anything.

Getting the order right

The default order is summary, experience, education, skills. Two situations change it.

If you are a recent graduate or still studying, education moves above experience, because it is the strongest thing you have. Once you have two or three years of relevant work, it moves back down — a hiring manager stops caring about your degree classification long before you stop being proud of it.

If you are in a field where the toolkit is the first filter — software, data, anything with a specific technology stack — a compact skills block above experience saves the reader hunting for it. Keep it tight: five or six grouped lines, not a wall of thirty items.

Contact details, and the ones that go wrong

This block takes two lines and is the only part of the CV where an error is fatal rather than unhelpful. A typo in a bullet point costs you a little credibility; a typo in your email address costs you the application.

• Your name, at a size that makes it the first thing read. It does not need the word "CV" above it — the reader knows what they opened.
• One phone number, with the country code if you are applying abroad. A recruiter in Berlin will not guess the dialling prefix for a number you wrote for domestic use.
• One email address, and one you will actually read on a weekday. An address built from your name is the safe choice; the one you made at sixteen is not.
• City and country. Not the street, not the postcode. Location matters because of commuting distance, visas and time zones, and a city answers all three.
• A link only if it adds evidence — a portfolio, a repository profile, a professional network profile that is current. A link to an empty or abandoned profile is worse than no link.

The professional summary

A summary is three or four lines at the top of the page whose only job is to let a reader place you in about five seconds: what you do, at what level, and in what context.

It is worth writing once you have a few years of experience, and it is usually worth skipping before that — a graduate summary tends to restate the degree that is visible two inches lower down. It is also the part of the CV that most rewards being rewritten per application, because it is the part a reader is guaranteed to read.

The failure mode is a paragraph of qualities rather than facts. Words like "passionate", "results-driven" and "team player" are claims anybody can make, cost nothing to write, and are therefore read as noise.

Writing experience that says something

This is where most CVs fall down, and the failure is almost always the same one: describing the job rather than what you did in it. A job description is a list of things the role involves. A CV entry should be a list of things you achieved while doing them.

The practical test takes one question per line: could the person who held this job before you have written exactly this? If the answer is yes, the line is about the post rather than about you. Our guide on describing work experience works the test through with rewrites.

How much detail per role

Weight the page towards the recent and the relevant. Your current or most recent role can take four to six bullet points. The one before it, three or four. Anything more than about eight years old usually needs one line, or can be collapsed into a short "earlier career" block with job titles and dates only.

This is also the answer to running over length. Most people who cannot fit onto two pages are giving equal space to a job from 2014 and a job from last year.

Education, at whatever stage you are at

How much space education deserves is entirely a function of how long ago it was. A final-year student writes several lines; someone fifteen years into a career writes one.

The stable part is the format: qualification, institution, and the years. A classification or grade is worth including while it is still doing work for you — in your first few years, and in fields that screen on it, such as law, medicine and parts of finance. After that it takes up a line and answers a question nobody asked.

Modules, dissertation titles and project work belong on the CV of someone who does not yet have much employment to show, and only where they are relevant to the advert. A dissertation on a subject adjacent to the job is evidence. A list of every module you sat is a transcript, and nobody asked for the transcript.

• Still studying: give the course, the institution, the expected completion date, and say it is expected rather than achieved.
• Studied abroad, applying at home: name the country and, if the qualification has no local equivalent, say what it is comparable to rather than leaving the reader to guess.
• Did not finish: state the years attended and the subject without inventing an award. An honest partial entry is unremarkable; a fabricated completed one is grounds for dismissal years later.
• Professional qualifications and licences go here or in their own section, with the awarding body and the year. Include a registration number only where the profession expects it.

Skills, without the ratings

A skills section exists so a reader scanning for one specific capability can find it without reading three job descriptions. That purpose tells you how to write it: specific, grouped, and short.

Specific means naming the actual thing. "Microsoft Excel, including pivot tables and Power Query" is checkable. "Computer literate" is not. Grouped means two to five headings — tools, languages, domains, whatever fits your field — rather than a run-on list of thirty items in which nothing stands out.

Two things to avoid. The first is skill bars, star ratings and percentages: nobody can say what 80% Python means, and they carry no information to a reader and none at all to software parsing the file. The second is listing a skill you could not discuss for five minutes. Everything on this section is an invitation to be asked about it.

• Group by kind, and put the group the advert cares about first.
• Name versions, frameworks or standards where they distinguish you, and leave them off where they merely date you.
• Languages belong here or in their own section. State them at a recognised level rather than as "fluent" — the CEFR scale, A1 to C2, is the common reference in Europe and is understood well beyond it.
• Leave out anything now assumed: email, web browsing, word processing.

Optional sections, and when they earn their place

Everything past the core five has to displace something. The test is whether it gives the reader evidence they do not already have, for this particular job.

• Projects — strong when you have little employment history or when the work shows a skill your jobs did not. Give the problem, what you built, and the outcome.
• Certifications — worth a section when the field screens on them. Include the year, and do not list an expired certification as current.
• Publications and conference presentations — expected for academic, research and clinical roles, and usually noise elsewhere.
• Volunteering — include it when it demonstrates something relevant, such as managing people or handling money, and not as a character reference.
• Interests — the most over-argued line on a CV. One short line is harmless and occasionally opens an interview; a paragraph about socialising and travelling says nothing.
• Referees — leave them off entirely. You will be asked when it matters.

What this looks like assembled

The example below applies everything above to a single fictional CV: a summary that states level and context, experience weighted towards the recent, education compressed to one line, and grouped skills with no ratings.

Tailoring it to the advert

Tailoring is misunderstood as rewriting the document for every application, which is exhausting and usually makes the result worse. What actually needs to change is the top third and the emphasis.

Read the advert twice. The first read tells you what the job is; the second, looking only at the order in which requirements are listed, tells you what they care about most. Then make sure the first third of your CV — summary, skills block, the opening bullets of your current role — speaks to the top of that list.

Use the employer's vocabulary where it is genuinely your vocabulary too. If the advert says "stakeholder management" and you wrote "client liaison" for the same work, match them; both descriptions are true, and only one of them is being searched for. What you must not do is claim a requirement you do not meet because the word appears in the advert.

1. List the advert's requirements in the order it gives them.
2. Mark the ones you can evidence with something you have actually done.
3. Move that evidence into the first third of the page, rewording to match the advert's terms where both descriptions are accurate.
4. Leave the rest of the history alone.

Things to leave off

• A photo, unless you are applying somewhere it is conventional — much of continental Europe expects one, the UK, Ireland and the United States do not.
• Date of birth, marital status, nationality and religion. In many countries employers actively do not want this information.
• Your full postal address. City and country is enough, and it is what a recruiter actually needs.
• "References available on request." Everyone knows. It is a wasted line.
• Skill bars, star ratings and percentage proficiency. They mean nothing precise and parse as nothing at all.
• An objective statement about what you want, unless you are changing career and need to explain the pivot.

Before you send it

1. Read it aloud. Anything you stumble over is a sentence that needs rewriting.
2. Check every date. Overlapping or impossible dates are noticed and are hard to explain away.
3. Open every link. A dead portfolio link is worse than no link.
4. Save as PDF, not a word processor document, unless the advert asks otherwise.
5. Name the file properly: your name and the role, not "CV final v3".
6. Read the advert once more and check that the words it uses appear somewhere on your CV, where they are true.