Your
CV — as its full name, "curriculum vitae," suggests — is the record
of your academic life. But it’s also a passport through that life, and one
you’ll have to show to gatekeepers over and over.
Of
course a strong CV is built on strong achievements. But you also have to
present your record in an interesting and impressive way. And that’s where many
aspiring candidates fall short.
What
follows are eight tips to improve your CV.
But
first, understand the difference between a CV and a résumé. There’s plenty of
overlap between the two — it’s fair to describe a CV as an academic résumé. But
the differences are salient. A résumé tends to be directly purpose-driven. It
might start out with an explicit career objective ("a public-relations
position that combines analysis and customer relations"), while a CV
rarely features that kind of rhetoric.
CVs have specific
purposes, too — they’re more implicit, that’s all. You have to design
a CV for the audience it will.
Résumés
are typically more compact than CVs. Just about everyone who’s written a résumé
has encountered the injunction to keep it short. But if a CV is usually more
comprehensive, that doesn’t mean it should be swollen with watery excess. Keep
in mind that every unnecessary item on your vita threatens, by its very
presence, to distract your reader from the necessary stuff.
What
makes a CV entry necessary? That depends on who’s reading, and why.
Always remember:
Your CV combines autobiography and salesmanship. It needs to
persuade readers to hire you for the job, give you the grant, or award you the
fellowship. You have to select the aspects of yourself that will sell you to
your specific audience.
Other
people read your CV because they have something you want. When you prepare the
document for their eyes, keep your specific goal in mind and customize
accordingly. If you’re sending your CV as part of an application for a grant,
you probably don’t need to include your campus service work — because
unnecessary extras distract the reader. If you’re applying for a teaching job
at a research university, you’ll present your teaching record differently than
if you’re applying for an opening at a private high school.
In
other words, a CV is not just a written record of your credentials. It’s an
argument in favor of you. Write with that in mind.
Generally speaking,
put your educational credentials first. As you make that argument for
yourself, follow the prevailing rules. Education is the business most
CV-readers are in. Readers of résumé might not care much about where you went
to school and what degrees you got, but CV readers almost always look for that
information right away. Don’t annoy them by burying it.
When
you lay out your CV, follow the conventions of your discipline. A CV is not the
place to challenge your reader’s assumptions. If scientists expect your
publications to be presented in chronological order and in a specific
bibliographic format, then meet their expectations. If you don’t, you’ll
distract your readers from their most important task, which is to assess your
credentials.
Draft your vita
knowing it will be skimmed. I keep returning to distraction because it ought to be
your greatest concern. Consider that most people going through a stack of
applications will spend only a couple of minutes reading each CV — if that. You
have to make the most of that brief time.
Worse,
most readers don’t read a CV carefully. They skim it. You can’t change that
fact, so accommodate to it instead: Write to be skimmed. Which brings me to my
next two points.
Most important,
write visually. That’s an umbrella term. It means you should attend to the
visual balance between text and white space on your CV, use formatting
thoughtfully to create emphasis, and, above all, consider the movement of a
skimming reader’s fast-moving eye.
You
may wonder how you can tell where readers are going to look. It takes some
practice. You can get it by reading other people’s CVs (which are abundant
online), and watching where your own eyes travel. Where do you home in? What do
you skip? Do your eyes move sequentially from section marker to section marker,
or do they jump around?
A
good CV uses formatting to catch and direct the reader’s attention. Boldface,
for example, will attract the reader — as it does you when you read this essay.
Underlining does the same.
On
the other hand, big bricks of text — i.e., chunky paragraphs — will repel
readers. When the skimming reader’s eye encounters a long paragraph, it usually
just bounces off it and drops downward to the next resting point. Resting
points are important because even skimming readers need a place to stop.
Indentation and other formatting choices provide visual variety and contrasts,
and they also provide section markers to give readers a momentary rest before
you redirect them.
Use
boldface, underlining, and other attention-getting hooks judiciously. Overuse
renders them ineffective, or worse. If a CV assaults the eye with a blizzard of
words and a farrago of underlining, bolding, italics, text boxes, and so on,
you’ll turn off many readers and get less of their precious time.
Front-load your
most important entries. This, too, is about keeping in mind your readers’ limited
amount of time for looking at CVs. If your most impressive credential is the
prize you won for your dissertation, then figure out a way to put it before
your reader as soon as you can — and flag it so it won’t be missed.
You
have to do that because reading lengthy CVs gets tiring very fast. Make sure
your readers see what you want them to see before they run out of attention,
shift into "it’s time to finish" mode, and start hitting "page
down."
You’ll
conserve your reader’s patience if you present the important stuff
intelligibly. Unless you’re applying for an opening in a department you’re
already teaching in, your reference to "Sociology 342" will be lost.
Worse, it will be interpreted as a sign that you don’t really understand who
your audience is — and your readers will take note of that failure.
Use your CV to
guide the interview you hope to land. Your CV should include only those
things that you want to talk about in the job interview. Remember that an
interview is a conversation about you — and your application provides the
ingredients for that discussion. Imagine how you’d like the conversation to go,
and organize your CV to make that outcome more, not less, likely.
The
inverse also holds true: If you don’t want to talk about a particular
controversy in your field (say, a high-profile sexual-harassment case in your
discipline), then avoid names and references on your CV that might lead a
reader to ask you about it.
Of
course your application comprises more than your CV. If you’re applying for a
job, your cover letter is at least as important.
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