If you are in graduate school or your postdoc, you should be building your CV, or Curriculum Vitae. You will use it to apply for awards, scholarships, and academic jobs. However, if you are going to apply to non-academic jobs, using your academic CV could be a big mistake. Industry employers, the private sector, or whatever you want to call them, don’t know what to make of a resume. It’s too long and it doesn’t tell them much of what they are looking for. Mainly, it paints you as an out-of-touch academic who will not fit in in Industry.

As a former academic who crossed over into the private sector, I had to learn how to convert my CV into a resume.  And it worked! to get me a job. I went from 10 pages down to two pages. How? 

Let’s look at the structure of my Resume first, then look at the structure of my CV.

Resume:

Name, degree, desired job title

Contact Info

Summary (three bullet points)

Experience

Education

Software skills

Honors, Awards, and Hobbies

CV:

Curriculum Vitae for Name

Contact Info

Technical Skills

Positions Held

Education

Professional Affiliations

Mentoring

     Postdocs

     Graduate Students

     Undergraduates

     Visitors

Publications

Grants Awarded

Teaching

     Courses

     Workshops

Professional Development

Invited Seminars

Conference Oral Presentations

Conference Poster Presentations

Awards

Service

You see that the CV has basically everything I have done since I entered undergraduate. The resume leaves most of that stuff off. Why? Curriculum vitae translates roughly to “the course of my life” or “life history”, so it is basically a listing of what a person has done over their professional life. Resume translates to “summary”, which is also accurate when compared to a lengthy CV.

There are other important differences. Note that above I said that a CV is a LISTING of what a person has done. A CV is very much past-looking, and it is a matter-of-fact list. A reader of a CV fills in much of the details in their mind. They assume that if I list publications with “transcriptomics” in the title that I have skills in some way related to transcriptomics. A resume, on the other hand, interprets what a person has done, and is focused on skills and results. It does not leave it up to the reader to guess whether or not I have transcriptomics skills, it will both tell and show that I do, by stating it explicitly, and backing it up with a result.

To elaborate on this theme, my CV lists about 9 publications, several conference presentations, and a few grants that deal with transcriptomics. The reader of my CV is expected to recognize that I probably know how to use transcriptomic data to generate some new knowledge. But in my resume, all of those sources would be synthesized into a bullet point stating something like: “Skills in analysis of large datasets by methods such as transcriptomics, resulting in 9 publications and multiple funded grants”. See what I did there? And there is no need to list all my publications anymore. Instead, I include a link to my Google Scholar page and my ORCID ID.

There are a couple of different ways to summarize your CV into a resume. One method is to use the following pattern (that I used above): Transferrable skill + Technical detail + Quantifiable result. A second method is STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. In either case, what you want to do is convert your matter-of-fact, past-looking CV list into concrete examples of your skills and ability to achieve results. A CV is “What have you done before?” and a resume is “What can you do now?”

Another big difference is in the “Positions Held” vs “Experience” sections. The Positions Held part of the CV is a simple list of dates, titles, and employer. Experience has that information, plus all the bullet points demonstrating your skills and results, pulled from the other sections like Publications and Conference presentations. 

I hope that helps! Send me any questions you might have and I will do my best to get you an answer. Take a look at this table below for some more comparisons between the two document types.