How to Write a CV: Complete UK Job Guide

Open two or three job adverts that are close to the role you want. Do not copy their wording blindly. Look for repeated requirements, such as customer service, diary management, stakeholder communication, Python, safeguarding, stock control, sales targets, or budget ownership.

Create a short evidence list under three headings:

• must-have experience, qualifications, licences, or tools
• achievements that prove you have used those skills
• transferable examples from work, study, volunteering, projects, care responsibilities, or personal commitments

This step stops your CV becoming a list of everything you have ever done. It also gives you a simple test for each line: does this help the reader see why you fit the target role?

Most weak CVs are not weak because the person lacks value. They are weak because the evidence is hidden. Before drafting, write rough notes about outcomes, responsibilities, scale, tools, people, and constraints.

Use prompts such as:

• What did I improve, fix, organise, deliver, support, sell, design, analyse, teach, clean, maintain, build, or protect?
• Who benefited from the work?
• What systems, tools, regulations, or methods did I use?
• How many customers, cases, orders, students, tickets, projects, rooms, suppliers, reports, or users were involved?
• What changed because of my work?

You do not need a number in every bullet, and you should never invent one. But specific evidence is stronger than a duty list. “Handled customer queries” is ordinary. “Resolved 40+ weekly customer queries across email and phone while keeping complaint escalations below team average” tells the recruiter more.

The best way to learn how to write a CV efficiently is to separate the baseline from the application version. Your baseline CV is your master document. It can include more evidence than you will send. Your tailored CV is the version you edit down for one vacancy.

Keep the baseline organised by section, with spare bullet points under each role. When you apply, choose the most relevant bullets, adjust the profile, reorder the skills, and check that the job advert’s essential criteria are visible. This is faster than starting again each time and safer than sending the same generic CV everywhere.

A first-job CV should not pretend you have a long work history. Use school, college, university, volunteering, clubs, sports, personal projects, caring responsibilities, and part-time work to show reliability, communication, organisation, and willingness to learn.

A career-change CV should make the bridge obvious. Lead with transferable skills, relevant training, and projects before the reader gets lost in old job titles. For example, a hospitality supervisor moving into office administration might highlight scheduling, stock records, customer complaints, supplier contact, cash handling, and team coordination.

A senior CV should not give equal space to every role. It should show scope, leadership, commercial impact, governance, risk, stakeholder influence, and strategic outcomes. Older roles can be shortened if they no longer help the target.

Reverse chronological means your most recent role, course, or qualification appears first. It is the safest choice for candidates with relevant work history, steady career progression, or experience in the same field.

A typical order is:

1. name and contact details
2. short personal statement or profile
3. key skills or core strengths
4. work experience
5. education and qualifications
6. optional sections, such as projects, volunteering, languages, certifications, or professional memberships

Use the CV structure guide if your content is roughly right but the section order feels messy. Structure is not decoration. It decides what the recruiter sees first.

A skills-based CV groups your evidence by skill area rather than by job. It can help when you are changing career, returning after a long break, or applying with limited direct work experience. The risk is that it can feel vague if the work history is hidden.

A hybrid CV is often better. It gives you a short skills-led summary near the top, then a clear work history underneath. This lets you frame your transferable skills without making the reader hunt for dates, employers, and context.

For example, a parent returning to work after caring responsibilities might use a hybrid CV with sections for administration, communication, planning, and digital tools, followed by earlier roles and recent volunteering.

Most UK job applications work best with a one or two-page CV. One page can suit school leavers, students, early-career applicants, and people applying for simple part-time roles. Two pages suit most experienced candidates. Academic, medical, research, technical, or senior leadership CVs may need more detail, but the same principle applies: every section should earn its place.

Do not shrink the font to force everything onto one page. A cramped CV is harder to read. It is better to remove old, repeated, or low-value content than to make the document dense.

Use simple headings such as Profile, Key Skills, Work Experience, Education, Certifications, Projects, Volunteering, and Additional Information. Avoid clever labels that an applicant tracking system or busy recruiter may not recognise.

Use consistent spacing, dates, and bullet styles. A recruiter should be able to skim the page and understand your timeline without decoding the layout.

Include your full name, mobile number, professional email address, broad location, and relevant link if it helps. A LinkedIn profile, portfolio, GitHub, design portfolio, writing samples, or professional website can be useful when it proves your work.

A clean contact section might look like this:

Maya Shah
Birmingham, UK
maya.shah@email.com | 07123 456789
linkedin.com/in/mayashah | portfolio link if relevant

You do not need your full home address. A town, city, county, or “remote, UK” is usually enough. Avoid unnecessary identity, demographic, financial, or referee details that do not help the hiring decision. The National Careers Service also advises against adding personal details that are not needed for the role.

The personal statement is a short profile under your contact details. It should tell the recruiter what you do, what you are good at, and why your background fits the role. Three to five lines is enough.

A useful structure is:

[Role or career stage] with experience in [relevant setting]. Strong in [two or three skills linked to the advert]. Looking to bring [evidence or motivation] to [target role or sector].

Weak profile:

I am a hard-working and motivated person with excellent communication skills. I work well alone or in a team and I am looking for a new challenge.

Stronger profile:

Customer service adviser with three years’ experience handling phone, email, and live chat queries for a high-volume utilities team. Strong in complaint resolution, account updates, and explaining complex billing information clearly. Looking to bring calm customer support and accurate case handling to a busy financial services contact centre.

The stronger version works because it names the job context, shows relevant skills, and points to the next role. It does not rely on empty adjectives.

Use the CV personal statement examples guide if your opening sounds generic, too long, or disconnected from the role.

You do not need to rewrite your whole CV every time, but the profile should respond to the job advert. If the advert asks for stakeholder management, data analysis, and reporting, those ideas should appear near the top if they are truthful. If the advert is for an entry-level role, the profile should show willingness to learn, reliability, and practical evidence rather than pretending to be senior.

A tailored profile reassures the reader that the rest of the CV is worth their time.

Choose skills that match the target role and that you can support elsewhere in the CV. A long list of generic skills is weaker than a shorter list of relevant skills.

Split your skills into three types:

• role-specific skills, such as bookkeeping, lesson planning, JavaScript, stock control, safeguarding, diary management, paid social, or patient observations
• tool and system skills, such as Excel, Microsoft 365, Sage, Xero, Salesforce, HubSpot, Power BI, Figma, GitHub, Jira, Adobe Creative Cloud, or industry equipment
• transferable strengths, such as customer communication, prioritisation, problem solving, team coordination, training, conflict resolution, or written reporting

For an administration CV, a skills section might include diary management, inbox handling, document formatting, meeting coordination, CRM updates, Excel tracking, supplier communication, and accurate data entry.

For a junior developer CV, it might include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React basics, GitHub, API integration, debugging, responsive design, accessibility awareness, and project documentation.

Use Skills on a CV when you need help choosing what belongs in the skills section and what should be proved through experience.

Work experience should not read like a job description copied from your contract. The employer already knows what a sales assistant, nurse, analyst, chef, administrator, teacher, or developer generally does. They need to know what you handled and how well you did it.

Use this simple pattern:

Action verb + task or responsibility + context, scale, tool, audience, or result.

Weak bullet:

Responsible for social media.

Stronger bullet:

Planned and scheduled weekly Instagram and LinkedIn posts for a local events brand, increasing average post engagement by 28% over three months.

Weak bullet:

Helped with admin tasks.

Stronger bullet:

Updated customer records, prepared meeting packs, and tracked invoice queries in Excel, reducing missing information before weekly account reviews.

Weak bullet:

Worked in a team.

Stronger bullet:

Supported a six-person café team during weekend peaks, balancing till work, table service, and stock checks while maintaining calm customer communication.

The stronger bullets are still concise, but they give the reader something to believe.

The National Careers Service explains the STAR method as Situation, Task, Action, and Result, and notes that it can be used on a CV as well as in interviews and application forms. On a CV, you do not need four labelled sentences. You need the useful parts compressed into one or two lines.

Instead of writing:

Situation: the team had too many support tickets. Task: I had to reduce the backlog. Action: I organised the queue. Result: tickets were answered faster.

Write:

Reprioritised a 120-ticket support backlog by urgency and customer value, helping the team clear overdue cases within one week.

This gives the situation, action, and result without wasting space.

Use the work experience on a CV guide if your role history still reads like a duty list.

Your current or most relevant role usually deserves the most detail. Older or less relevant jobs can be shorter. A part-time job from five years ago might need two bullets if it proves customer service, reliability, or cash handling. A recent role that matches the target job might need five or six carefully chosen bullets.

Do not remove older experience just because it is not perfect. If it proves transferable skills, keep the best evidence and make the relevance clear.

If you are a student, graduate, school leaver, or career changer with recent training, education may sit above work experience. Include the qualification, institution, dates, and relevant modules, projects, dissertation, grades, placements, or awards where useful.

If you have several years of relevant experience, education can usually move below work history. You can keep it concise unless the qualification is essential for the role.

Use education on a CV if you are unsure where qualifications, grades, certificates, and training should sit.

Optional sections can strengthen a CV when they add evidence. Good options include:

• projects, especially for developers, designers, analysts, students, and career changers
• volunteering, especially when it proves leadership, safeguarding, customer contact, events, admin, mentoring, or community work
• certifications, licences, and registrations, such as CSCS, food hygiene, DBS checks where relevant, first aid, AAT, CIPD, Prince2, ITIL, driving licences for driving roles, or professional memberships
• languages, when useful for the role or customer base
• publications, conferences, or research for academic and specialist roles
• interests, only when they show relevant commitment, leadership, discipline, or community involvement

Do not add an interests section just to look friendly. Add it because it supports the application.

An ATS-friendly CV is easy for recruitment software to parse and easy for a person to read. Use normal headings, real text, clear dates, and simple bullet points. Avoid placing key information only in images, icons, text boxes, headers, footers, or complex columns.

Use keywords from the job advert naturally. If the advert says “case management”, “Excel reporting”, and “client onboarding”, use those terms where they truthfully describe your experience. Do not hide keywords in white text or stuff the CV with repeated phrases.

Use the ATS-friendly CV guide when applying through portals or large employer systems.

Follow the employer’s instructions first. If they ask for Word, send Word. If they ask for PDF, send PDF. If there is no instruction, PDF usually preserves layout, while Word may be preferred by some recruitment systems.

Use a clear file name:

Maya-Shah-CV-Admin-Assistant.pdf

Avoid names such as:

CV-final-final-new2.pdf

Check every link before sending. Broken portfolio, LinkedIn, or GitHub links can weaken an otherwise good application.

The top third of the first page matters most. It usually contains your contact details, profile, and key skills. After tailoring, this area should reflect the role’s main requirements.

If a project coordinator advert asks for scheduling, stakeholder updates, risk logs, and reporting, the profile and skills should not lead with unrelated customer service unless that is the only evidence you have. Bring the closest proof forward.

You do not need a new CV for every application. Often, you can tailor by reordering and trimming. Move the most relevant bullets higher. Remove evidence that belongs to a different target. Change vague wording into the language of the advert where it is accurate.

For example, if the advert asks for “stakeholder communication”, and your bullet says “kept managers and suppliers updated”, you can rewrite it as:

Maintained clear stakeholder updates for managers and suppliers, reducing repeat queries during weekly delivery planning.

That is tailoring. Copying the advert word for word without proof is not.

For a no experience CV, focus on what proves work readiness: attendance, punctuality, coursework, volunteering, clubs, sports, caring responsibilities, projects, customer-facing situations, and willingness to learn.

For a graduate CV, connect your degree, placements, dissertation, societies, internships, part-time work, and projects to the employer’s criteria. Do not assume the degree title explains your fit.

For a career change CV, make the transfer explicit. A recruiter may not connect the dots between your old sector and the new role unless you help them. Use the profile, skills, and selected achievements to show the overlap.

For a senior or executive CV, tailoring should show level. Replace small task detail with scope, decision-making, leadership, budgets, risk, transformation, governance, people management, and commercial outcomes. A senior CV should still be concise, but it should not undersell responsibility.