How to create a winning academic CV
What is the key to creating a CV that will open doors to that academic position just right for you? The answer is a winning academic CV—one that effectively highlights your academic qualifications, research and teaching experience, publications, and other academic achievements. This is quite different from a regular CV that covers mostly work experience, skills, and qualifications and is used to apply for non-academic roles. And so, let’s walk through some of the steps in creating a great academic CV.
Step 1: List all the details
List the following information using bullet points instead of sentences and a clean and clear format:
Name and contact information
The first detail on your CV is always your full name. This is followed by your contact details, which include your current residential address, phone number(s), and professional email. In this section, you could also provide links to your LinkedIn page or professional webpage, if any. Ensure that the email address you provide is not unprofessional or inappropriate.
Career summary
A career summary is a clear and concise, 3–5-line paragraph providing a brief overview of your academic and professional experience, along with some key research findings, key achievements, major technical skills, and career goals.
Education
In this section, you should list—in reverse chronological order—your formal educational qualifications, right from your PhD back to your college degrees, including the thesis or dissertation topics, institution names, and the years you studied there.
Research experience
This section, too, you should arrange in reverse chronological order. List all research positions you have held, right from your time as a research assistant, including dates, job titles, and institution names. List under appropriate sections the projects you have worked on and their goals and outcomes. This is where you would highlight your contributions to the project, your subject expertise, and the technical skills you possess and how you used them.
Teaching experience
All relevant teaching experience, including lecturing, supervision, assistantships, assessments, etc., can be included under this heading in reverse chronological order. Expand on each of your teaching experiences with details about institution, courses taught, grade or level of the class, number of students you handle(d) and duration spent. When describing your teaching experience, ensure that you list the subjects you taught and not the course codes.1
Administrative experience
Demonstrate your administrative skills and leadership potential by listing your contributions to events, budget management, committee work, etc. Include numbers to indicate impact, specific details about your accomplishments, and of course, the dates/duration that you were involved in, in this activity.
Professional experience
Any relevant non-academic experience can be listed in this section. This includes any industry or corporate jobs that you may have had. Provide details such as dates, job titles, organisations, and brief descriptions of your roles.2
Publications
In the early stages of your career, you may not have a long list of published peer-reviewed research papers. But you may still have other publications worth mentioning. You can include, in addition to research papers, book chapters, relevant articles written for newspapers/magazines, reports, patents, etc., in reverse chronological order.3 You could also mention papers that are accepted, under review, or in preparation, ensuring that the status is mentioned within parentheses.
If, however, you do have a good number of publications, then list only the most significant and recent ones in this section and include the rest as an exhaustive list in an appendix. There is also some merit in adding altmetric information of your articles, especially if you have access to them and you see that they are faring well in the public sphere.
Ensure that you follow a consistent referencing style throughout, highlighting your name in boldface. Remember that most CVs are now viewed digitally. So, it’s important to include hyperlinks to your publications so that interviewers can easily access them.4
Science Communication
If you have significant experience in scicomm and you are passionate about it, then do include this section. It is after all a very valuable skill, given its growing importance in today’s world. You can list activities such as writing blog posts, giving public lectures, undertaking sci-art initiatives, organizing public outreach events, and more. Be sure to highlight the impact of your efforts, such as the number of people you reached or the number of views your work received.
Professional development
Use this section to call attention to the training programs you have attended, certifications you have received, and workshops you have attended, to demonstrate your commitment to professional development and your desire to stay up-to-date in your field. List these in reverse chronological order and include dates and the name of the institute that offered the program.
Awards and honours
In this part, list any fellowships, grants, scholarships, or other funding that you have received. If the award is not well known, then provide context and details such as the award’s purpose and selection criteria.
Skills
List all your technical, practical, language, and software skills in this section.
Conferences and seminars
As an early career researcher, you may have attended more conferences and seminars than you have presented at. List all conferences and seminars, including the name and location of the event, dates, and the title of your poster/presentation if applicable. Indicate, in parentheses, whether you attended only or presented too. If the list is too long, then focus only on those events that you presented in.5,6
Professional affiliations
List any professional societies, groups, or associations you belong to, in this section.
References
Provide the details of at least two to three referees. Include their names, affiliations, designations, and contact details. These could be your supervisor or PI or someone who holds a senior position and has worked with you and can vouch for your research, skills, and work ethic. Ensure that you obtain the permission of these individuals before adding their details in your CV.3,7
Step 2: Customize your CV
Once you have created an exhaustive CV containing all your achievements, skills, and contributions, set this aside, and do not apply for any role with this CV. Yes, you read that right. Instead, treat this document as a master CV that you update every few months. Now, to apply for any role, create a copy of this document and tailor it to match the role you are interested in; create a new customised CV that makes a compelling case for why you are ideal for that role.8
To do this, you will need to read and understand the job description. What skill set are they looking for? What does the position demand? Start with a career summary highlighting the skills and experiences you possess that are relevant to the job you’re applying for.
Applying for a role that involves mostly teaching? Copy and paste your teaching experience and skills on top, above the rest. Applying for a leadership position? Show at the very start of your CV that you have led and you have the skills to lead, highlighting the project- and people-management roles you have performed. Do this with the other sections of your CV as well, removing or condensing the sections that may not be relevant for the role you are applying to. Want to apply to a research-oriented position? Put your research expertise right on top with more details such as relevant technical challenges you faced in your research and how you overcame these.
The key is to isolate and present specific skills and experiences from your career path that match the job requirements, even if that means deprioritizing some of your proudest achievements.1,8
Step 3: Format it
Do not attempt to go fancy with your typeface choices. Stick to one or two typefaces that are easy to read and easy to skim through. Use a consistent format throughout, with a font size that is either 11 or 12 pt. Leave an inch of margin on all four sides.3 Also adjust the line spacing to create more white space and make your CV more readable.
Use boldface or italics to highlight text where necessary, but use them in moderation. Use headers to put your name on every page. Also, mark each page with the page number.1 Lastly, make sure that no section is split across two pages.
If you are a researcher at an early stage of your career, your CV should be ideally no more than 5 pages long.8 Once you are done with your CV, proofread it thoroughly to ensure that there are no errors. Check and confirm that your hyperlinks work. And finally, get a close friend or colleague to go through it once, because they may spot errors that you missed.
Now, with these pointers, go ahead and spend some time crafting that perfect CV. I assure you it is time well spent.
References
1. Joy, S. Academic CVs: 10 irritating mistakes. The Guardian (2013).
2. Toronto, U. of. Creating your academic cv. https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/orss/UserFiles/File/Creating_your_academic_cv_handout_1.pdf.
3. Writing an effective academic CV. beta.elsevier.com https://beta.elsevier.com/connect/writing-an-effective-academic-cv.
4. The digital scholar and the academic job market: Including hyperlinks in your CV can make a big difference. Impact of Social Sciences https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/06/15/the-digital-scholar-and-the-academic-job-market/ (2015).
5. London, I. C. How to write an academic CV. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/careers-service/public/the-application-process/How-to-Write-an-Academic-CV.pdf.
6. CV for PhD Application - Complete Guide | DiscoverPhDs. https://www.discoverphds.com/advice/applying/cv-for-phd-application (2020).
7. CV writing for research posts: Do’s, don’ts and practical pointers. Mendeley Careers https://www.mendeley.com/careers/news/career-advice/cv-writing-research-posts-dos-donts-and-practical-pointers.
8. The do’s and don’ts of academic CV writing. Teaching Matters blog https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/the-dos-and-donts-of-academic-cv-writing/ (2023).
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