How to write a CV: the UK, Irish and academic version, and what the law keeps off it

What goes on a UK or Irish CV and what equality law keeps off it, how it differs from a US resume, how an academic CV is built, and the narrative CV UK funders now ask for.

In the UK and Ireland, the two-page document you send for a job is a CV. In the United States the same document is a resume, and "CV" means something else: the long record of publications, grants and teaching that researchers keep. If you are writing the American one-pager, our guide to writing an effective resume is the one to read. This article is about the other two documents.

It covers the UK and Irish job CV section by section, what the law says about the personal details that still turn up on them, what changes if you have only ever written a US resume, and how an academic CV is built. It ends with something none of the usual guides mention: UKRI, the UK's main public research funder, has stopped asking for the publication list and now wants a narrative CV, and that changes how you write the academic version even when nobody asks for the narrative.

What the law keeps off a UK or Irish CV

The National Careers Service, the UK government's careers site, is blunt about personal details: "You should not include your age, your date of birth, whether you're married or your nationality". Every guide repeats the rule. None of them says why, and the why is what tells you where the line sits.

The reason is the Equality Act 2010. Section 4 lists nine protected characteristics: "age; disability; gender reassignment; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; sexual orientation." Section 39(1) then says an employer "must not discriminate against a person" in "the arrangements A makes for deciding to whom to offer employment". Shortlisting is one of those arrangements. The law binds the employer, not you. Nothing stops you writing your date of birth, but a birth date, a photo, a "married, two children" line or a nationality hands the shortlister four characteristics they are not allowed to use. Many of them would rather not see it. A University of Bath lecturer advert we read on 4 October 2026 says so in as many words: "personal details such as your name, may be removed from application forms at the initial shortlisting stage" (jobs.ac.uk, DTB870, read 2026-10-04; adverts expire).

Ireland has the same shape of rule with a longer list. The Employment Equality Acts 1998 to 2015 name nine discriminatory grounds: gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race (which the Act defines as "race, colour, nationality or ethnic or national origins") and membership of the Traveller community. "Family status" is the one most CVs still trip on. A line about your children is a protected ground in Dublin, so it goes.

Nationality is the detail people hesitate over, because every UK employer does have to check it. GOV.UK: "You must check that a job applicant is allowed to work for you in the UK before you employ them." That check happens on the application form or at offer, not on the CV. The Bath advert again: "We do not assess immigration or right to work status until offer stage." Answer the right-to-work question where it is asked and keep the passport off the page.

The UK CV, section by section

The structure is the one every guide gives, so this part is short. Two things are specific to the UK and worth getting right: the name is the title, and the grades mean something only to a British reader.

Name and contact. Do not write "Curriculum Vitae" across the top. Prospects, the UK graduate careers service, puts it plainly: "Let your name serve as the title". Then phone, email, town, a LinkedIn link.

Personal statement. Three or four lines under your name that say what you do, how long you have done it, and what you want next. UK adverts and recruiters call this a personal statement or profile, not a summary. It is where the job title in the advert should appear, in the advert's words. The resume summary guide shows how to build one line at a time; the mechanics are the same.

Employment history. Most recent first. Each entry: job title, employer, town, dates in month and year, then three to five bullets. Start each bullet with a verb and end it with a number where you have one. Duties copied from the job description tell the reader what the job was, not what you did with it.

Education. Most recent first, with the grade. This is where a UK CV reads differently from everything else. A degree is a "2:1" or a "First", school leaving is "A levels" with letter grades, and the earlier exams are GCSEs. GOV.UK's qualification levels place an A level at level 3, a "degree with honours" at level 6, a master's at level 7 and a doctorate at level 8. If you studied outside the UK, write the qualification as it is and add the level in brackets; do not convert the grade.

Skills. Software, languages with a level, licences, certifications. Keep the "team player" line out. Every guide says so, and a shortlister reading forty CVs has stopped seeing it.

Interests. One line, only if it says something about you a hiring manager would ask about. Delete "reading and travel".

References. The UK convention is a closing line, "References available on request", and it is on the way out. Prospects: "You can say 'references available upon request' but most employers would assume this to be the case." Leave the line off and use the space.

Two pages of A4 is the ceiling. Prospects: "We recommend CVs are no longer than two A4 pages." A first job can be one page. Three pages is for a senior or medical career, and even then the first page has to carry the application on its own.

What changes if you have only written a US resume

Someone arriving from the US usually sends a resume with a new file name. The content survives; the conventions do not.

The spelling row is not cosmetic. Keyword matching is literal, and we have measured our own: the matcher behind our ATS checker did not count "optimisation" as "optimization" when we tested it for the resume keywords guide. Write in the spelling the advert uses. A UK advert gets "organised"; a US multinational hiring in London that wrote its advert in Austin gets "organized".

The reverse trip matters too. If you are British and applying to a US employer, call the file a resume, cut it to one or two pages, and drop the "2:1", which means nothing in Chicago. And if the destination is France, the document changes shape again, photo included, which our guide to the French CV format covers.

The academic CV: sections, order and length

An academic CV is for a lectureship, a postdoc, a fellowship or a research post. It is longer because it carries a record, and it is still tailored, because the department reading it has a person specification and wants its boxes ticked in order.

How long is "longer"? Eleanor Hennige, research staff careers consultant at the University of Edinburgh, writing for Times Higher Education: "The average length for researchers at an early stage of their career is four to five pages". Newcastle University's careers service workbook says a targeted academic CV "will typically be around three pages long". Birmingham's postgraduate careers team adds that "It is acceptable to attach appendices with more details of research projects, publications etc.", which is how a long publication list stops crowding out the first page.

The sections, in the order Hennige gives them: Research, Teaching, Funding and Awards, Publications, Administration, Public Engagement. The order bends to the post. Birmingham: "Depending on the focus of the job, academic CVs usually highlight your research and/or teaching experience". A teaching-led post wants Teaching on page one; a research fellowship wants Research and Funding there.

What the entries hold, and how they differ from a job CV:

• The PhD entry is a paragraph, not a line. Title, dates, institution, supervisors, examiners, funding body, and two or three lines on the methods and the result. Newcastle: "Include name of supervisor(s) and sponsor/funding body. Describe aims, methodology and achievements of your project."
• Publications are grouped by status. Newcastle: "Distinguish between work published, submitted/accepted or under review." Use one referencing style throughout and put your own name in bold so the reader sees your position in the author list.
• Conferences say what you did there. Organised it, gave a paper, presented a poster, or attended. A list of conference names with no role is padding.
• Teaching is counted. Courses taught, level, class size, whether you designed or only delivered it, supervision and marking. A teaching qualification or Advance HE fellowship goes here.
• Referees are named, with full details. This is the opposite of the job CV. Newcastle: "Usually required to provide three, including a supervisor, a further academic (preferably in an area related to research) and one other." Name, title, department, email. Tell them which post you have applied for before the department writes to them.

The two rules from the job CV that still apply, in Hennige's words: do not write "Curriculum Vitae" at the top, and no date of birth for UK academic roles.

The narrative CV: UKRI has stopped asking for the list

Here is the part the ranking guides do not have. If you apply to UKRI for research funding, the publication list is no longer the document that gets read.

UK Research and Innovation, which runs the seven research councils, now uses the Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI). UKRI describes it as "a flexible narrative CV template" that is "designed to help you, or your team, evidence a wider range of skills and experience than a traditional academic CV when applying for UKRI funding opportunities." Its own template has four modules, and the headings are worth reading twice because none of them is "Publications":

• Module 1: "Contributions to the generation of new ideas, tools, methodologies or knowledge"
• Module 2: "The development of others and maintenance of effective working relationships"
• Module 3: "Contributions to the wider research and innovation community"
• Module 4: "Contributions to broader research/innovation-users and audiences and towards wider societal benefit"

UKRI leaves the length to each call ("The word count is specified in the funding opportunity"). Loughborough University's research office, summarising UKRI's guidance for its own staff, puts the usual figure at 1,000 words across the four modules, notes that the format is based on the Royal Society's Résumé for Researchers, and relays one instruction that matters for how you write: in module 1, "do not to refer to h-indices or journal impact rankings" (quoted as written). The same office describes the traditional academic CV the narrative replaces as "often narrowly focused" and tending "to include limited information beyond education history, publications and successful funding."

None of this came from nowhere. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, published in December 2012, asked institutions and funders to "not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions." A decade on, the UK's public research funder has built its CV template around that sentence.

What it means for your academic CV, even for a lectureship where nobody asks for an R4RI: the panel has been trained to look for contribution, not count. Hennige's warning in Times Higher Education is the one to keep: "Don't assume that a publication list means that you don't need to provide any detail on your research". So give each major output a line that says what you did and what changed because of it, keep the metrics off, and keep a 1,000-word narrative in the four modules in a drawer. The day a fellowship asks for it you will have a week, not a month.

What our tools do with a two-page or five-page CV

Most "ATS" advice tells you what unnamed software prefers. We can only speak for ours, so here is what it does with a CV that is longer than a resume.

When you build a CV in the HiredFolio editor and scan it against a saved job, a formatting check is 15% of the score and it counts words, not pages. Over 1,200 words costs 8 points of that component, which is about 1 point of the overall score, and the deduction is flat: on 2026-10-04 we ran the scorer on texts of 1,200, 1,201, 1,800 and 2,600 words, and only the first came back clean; the other three lost the same 8 points. At the 396 words an A4 page holds in Arial 11 point with one-inch margins, which our resume length article measured, a two-page UK CV sits well inside the band and a four-page academic CV is always over it. Read that suggestion as what it is, a job-CV rule, and ignore it for an academic one.

The free ATS checker, where you upload a PDF of up to 8 MB and paste the advert, has no formatting component at all: that check needs the structured CV from the editor, and with a PDF the score is built from keyword match, required skills and experience fit alone. So a long academic CV is not marked down for being long. It is marked down for missing the advert's words, and that is the useful signal for a UK application: paste the person specification, not the advert's opening paragraph, and the missing-keywords list tells you which essential criteria your CV never names.

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