Mandatory Sections

These should be on every CV.

Basic Information

Your CV should clearly mention your full name, email address, phone number and location. It doesn’t need to be your full address, but it could say London for example, so companies know where you are based. It is good practice to include your LinkedIn and GitHub links as well. These are typically at the top.

All links should have a hyperlink to make it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to access your link, like this - LinkedIn. See this guide on making custom LinkedIn URLs to make them more user friendly.

Different countries have different expectations about including your photo and gender. For example, some European countries make it mandatory to include your photo in your CV, whereas it is a big no in the UK and the USA due to risk of discrimination. Do some research about how it works in your region before deciding to include (or exclude) this information!

Profile Section

A profile section says who you are now, a quick summary of your skills and experience (1-2 sentences), and what you want to do next in your career. It needs to use action verbs and describe the job you’re applying to. Change this section depending on the advert you apply to, using the same keywords used in the advert.

Make sure the job title in the first line of the profile section matches the job you are applying for. If the job you are applying for is a Front End Web Designer, then write you are a Front End Web Designer even if your last job was widget sales. Nothing turns off a recruiter faster than if the first line of the CV says you are something they are not looking for!

Next, if the advert asks for certain tools or languages and you have that experience then mention them here. Bring out the most relevant bits of your CV experience in the next couple of sentences. Finally, the last sentence is what you want to do next in your career - what sort of role in what sort of organisation. Again, mirror the language of the job advert. If they say they are a young dynamic agency then write that you would like your next role to be in a young dynamic organisation.

Remember your personal statement should be personal to you. Lots of people write very generic statements that don’t say anything about themselves. Consider:

“An enthusiastic junior engineer eager to learn new skills. Experienced in JavaScript, NodeJS and React. Loves solving problems, and equally happy working on a team or alone. Can’t wait to start providing value to your team!”

Anyone could have written this, and it says nothing about the job being applied for. Probably 10 other people applying for the job wrote basically the same thing. This doesn’t make you stand out. Compare with:

“Career-changer with strong communication and storytelling skills from a background in journalism. Recently finished a practical course creating an interactive multi-user puzzle game as a final project, eager to combine storytelling and performant user-focused design into the world of game development.”

This is individual. It points at your specific background and skills, as well as highlighting why they’re relevant to the role being applied for.

If someone who knows you reads 5 personal statements, they should be able to tell which one is yours.

Employment Section

Here is where you detail any relevant employment experience, in chronological order with the most recent job first. You should think about what the message if you are trying to convey here and tailor it to achieve that, rather than just writing a list of everything you did in every job. You should go into the most detail on the experience that is most relevant, and the experience that is most recent. If education is more important than experience for this job advert, then put the education section above experience. Focus on the experience that is relevant to the job you want.

Career Change

If you have changed career, think about what transferrable skilled that you gained in your previous employment that may be relevant. Your previous experience is valuable, don’t hide it. Many career changers worry their background isn’t relevant, but employers actively value the diverse perspectives and real-world experience you bring. Whatever your background, you’ve developed skills that matter: working in teams, meeting deadlines, managing stakeholders, handling difficult situations, or leading projects. These are the professional capabilities that help people succeed in their tech careers, and they’re often harder to teach than coding itself.

Think broadly about your transferrable skills and highlight them with confidence. A journalist brings storytelling ability and clear communication, essential for writing documentation and explaining technical concepts. Retail experience demonstrates customer service skills, problem-solving under pressure, and the ability to understand user needs, all crucial in tech roles. A teacher has experience breaking down complex ideas, adapting to different learning styles, and managing multiple priorities.

If you had several similar roles that developed the same skills, you can group them (for example, “Retail Assistant, Companies X, Y, Z, 2000-2005”) and summarize the key skills you gained. This keeps your CV concise while ensuring your experience is visible.

Employment Gaps

If you have gaps in your employment and education it is better than you are clear as to what the gap was for, rather than leaving it to the readers imagination. You don’t need to go into great detail, A simple sentence to explain you took a year off whilst relocating or to focus on family responsibilities shows you are open and transparent.

Education Section

Here is where you summarise any relevant education in chronological order. You should have more detail about parts that are more relevant, so if you have a degree in a relevant subject you may write a couple of sentences about what you studied and your final project, but don’t put down every grade you got in high school. As well as degrees and formal education you can also put coding bootcamps like Code Your Future or other educational programs here if they are relevant.

Optional Sections

These will depend on your circumstance whether you include these or not. If you have things you want to highlight they can be included, but if you are already at the 2 page limit you may want to prioritise more content in the employment section. You could include some of these sections on your LinkedIn profile as space is less pertinent an issue there.

Projects

This is a great way to show off your technical skills, especially if your employment experience is in different jobs to the one that you are now trying to get.

Choose your 2 best projects to mention here, they should showcase skills that are relevant to the role you’re applying for. If you’re applying for a frontend design role, your projects must be beautiful. If you are applying for a backend role, you should not link to a static frontend with no backend work. If you have a third you want to include that showcases something different to the first two then you can add it, but don’t add more than three as it’s very unlikely they will ever be looked at.

Briefly describe what the project is, whether it is a personal project, or part of an educational course like Code Your Future or otherwise and what is impressive about it. You should also mention if it is a group project, as otherwise the hiring manager may be confused when they look at Github and see lots of commits from others. A long list of tech can be useful but isn’t impressive, and as before make sure to highlight any tech that you used that is a requirement for the job you are applying for. “Designed caching layer to minimise database reads with p90 page loads of 10ms” or “Learnt React in 1 week to build this project” or “In use by several community groups” is more impressive.

Link to both the GitHub for the project (with a good README - this has some guidelines on how to write one) and a deployed version. Make sure the deployed version is working, and loads quickly.

Certifications

Where you have certifications that are relevant they can be included here. For example if you are applying for jobs as a cloud engineer and you have done an Amazon Web Services certification, that would be useful to mention.

Tools and Technologies

You may want to include a section on the the technologies you are familiar with and what level you are at them. Some people like to have this information pulled out into its own section, however it is a matter of personal preference and not necessary. If you do choose to have this section make sure the things you list are relevant and not basic tools such as Microsoft Word or JIRA. It is also helpful to ensure the order of the technologies listed in your CV mirrors their importance within the job description, and so this is something you should tailor per company (don’t start your front end tools list with Angular if the role requires React etc.).

Interests

You may want to mention any interests that are particularly important to you, for example if you are an amateur musician, or a civilian police officer. You may also want to mention any other languages you speak here. These may be briefly asked about at the start or end of an interview to break the ice and get to know you as a person, just bear in mind this may be coming at the expense of using the space for some more relevant employment experience.

Formatting and length

You should have in mind the aim of making your CV as easy to read as possible. Therefore choose a simple font and use it consistently. Use bullet points and headings to make the sections clear and separate and use spacing between lines and sections so it does not look too much like a big blob of text.

It should also be a single column throughout. It’s ok to make your CV stand out - it can be beautiful and interesting but never at the expensive of ease of reading and understanding. Make sure someone can quickly read your CV and understand everything in it.

Your CV should be 2 pages maximum, but could be shorter depending on experience. As you get more experience you will consolidate and summarise your experience and often chop off earlier experience that is no longer relevant, so even in very senior positions it is still common to have 2 page long CVs.