Basic elements of academic CVs

• A master CV includes all information related to your academic career, enabling you to extract content for different purposes.

• Targeted CVs are written for specific applications and do not contain everything in a master CV.

• Frame achievements in your CV positively, but never exaggerate. 

• Group your achievements into categories to increase readability. 

• When writing targeted CVs, consider the audience and purpose of the application and include what is most relevant to that purpose. 

• Check the information in your CV is consistent with the rest of your application.

Read time: 9 min

‘Curriculum vitae’ is Latin for ‘course of (one’s) life’. As your life goes on and your career progresses, you will do and achieve more and your CV will get longer, often running to many pages. This makes it increasingly unlikely that you will ever be required to append your entire CV to an application. But it also makes it important to have one place in which to keep track of all your achievements. This means you should set up a master CV and maintain it.

A master CV is your ‘source of truth’ for all occasions. If your master CV is up to date, you can quickly extract from it whatever elements you need for a specific application or submission, without re-inventing the wheel. This is important because one size does not fit all – in other words, you will typically need to create a targeted CV every time you apply for something. 

Here we provide overall guidance on master and targeted CVs, then delve into the nitty gritty: the do’s and don’t’s of writing specific aspects of your CV.

CVs are a form of sales pitch in which you want to present yourself at your best. But while it’s perfectly acceptable not to mention things that didn’t work out (such as unsuccessful grant applications, papers that never got published), it is totally unacceptable to exaggerate your achievements or, worse still, to utterly fabricate them. It is highly likely that readers of your CV will spot check your claims. If even one claim does not stand up to scrutiny, this will cast doubt on all claims. Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, you become guilty until proven innocent. Furthermore, people talk: you may earn a reputation for dishonesty that goes well beyond the handful of people who read your CV.

The purpose of the master CV is to include everything relevant to your academic career. Below is an inexhaustive list of common content. You are not required to include all this information in your own master CV, but the list is just to give you some ideas. 

• Employment history

• Qualifications

• Prizes and awards

• Presentations (i.e. academic conferences and seminars)

• Publications, broken down in categories (e.g. peer-reviewed; commissioned reports; lay articles)

• Research funding broken down in categories (e.g. external, competitive; philanthropy; industry; internal funding)

• Collaborations

• Research supervision & mentoring

• Teaching

• Leadership

• Institutional contributions 

• Professional contributions (e.g. academic societies,  journal editorial board member)

• Advisory roles (e.g. government committees)

• Community outreach and engagement (e.g. public lectures, media interviews)

• Patents (if any)

• Non-traditional research outputs (NTROs)

You’ll probably find that you have something to say about most points in the top half or so of the list. After that, there tends to be more variation. To take just one example, early-career researchers are unlikely to have had any government advisory roles. 

It’s surprisingly common for people to forget a contribution they’ve made, or to overlook an achievement, thinking it unimportant. Perhaps you convened a reading group in your discipline, or organised an event in your school. You might consider these things trivial, but in fact they speak to your organisational and leadership abilities. So, dredge through your memories and record everything!

Another really useful piece of content is a career summary. This is a great way to begin your CV because it puts you in control of the narrative.

To make large amounts of information manageable for you and accessible to your readers, you need to organise it into categories. As a starting point, several useful categories are shown above. You may think of others. 

You might also consider grouping some of those categories of information into three higher-level categories: research, teaching, and service*. (Perhaps think of these as ‘chapters’ in your CV.) These categories are fundamental in academic life, and are the basis for most job and promotion applications. They are also useful if you’re applying for research funding because you can quickly extract from your CV everything pertaining to research only. 

* At the University, ‘service’ is understood as service to the University, the discipline and the community; and it is construed in terms of governance, leadership and engagement (GLE).

Academic CVs tend to prioritise content over form. These days, a CV can be a visually-attractive document that is easy to skim through, so readers can quicky find the information they’re looking for. A well-designed document enhances readability, plus it also reflects well on you. Would you wear a t-shirt and jeans to a job interview, or your best clothes? It’s the same with CVs.  

Think about including helpful headings and subheadings (making sure different heading levels are easily distinguishable), and plenty of white space. You might also consider using colour. But go easy on using bold, italics and underlining to emphasise words or phrases you consider important – too much of this becomes a distraction, reducing readability. 

You may wish to design your own CV, or you can download well-designed templates from the internet – these are often free. 

Whenever you are required to include your CV in an application (for a promotion, new job, prize, grant, tender etc.), it is advantageous to submit a CV that is tailored specifically to that application. Having a master CV makes this easy to do – you simply omit the information that is not relevant, perhaps re-order the sections to foreground the most relevant information and customise your career summary. 

As when preparing any piece of communication, you need to consider your audience: who will be reading your CV? Will it be other academics, or perhaps professional staff, public servants, consumers, industry specialists, or even a combination? Identifying the likely audience may influence the aspects of your career you choose to prioritise, as well as the level of explanatory detail you need to provide.

As an example of this last point, consider the different levels of explanation required for readers who are local, national or international. If you’re applying for a promotion at the University, then any faculty committees you’ve served on, or University prizes you’ve won, and so on, will be common knowledge to the University staff reading your CV. But these same things may be a complete mystery to anyone outside the University. The same applies to national positions, prizes and achievements if you’re writing to an international audience. This means that the level of explanation you need to provide will vary depending on your readership. 

Acronyms are a classic case. For example, can you assume that readers outside the University will know what FASS or ADP stand for, or that readers outside Australia will know what MRFF or ARC refer to?

If in doubt, explain.

Being clear about the purpose of a document goes hand-in-hand with identifying the audience: both are essential if you want to communicate effectively. It’s not enough to know, for example, that you’re applying for a prize; you need to be clear about which prize. Being precise about purpose will help you determine what information from your master CV is relevant. 

It’s worth noting here that you will often be asked to submit a CV of limited length, such as 2, 5 or 10 pages. In these situations, selecting the most relevant information becomes paramount. So, do you really need to mention that you played French horn in your school orchestra? Or that you’re in a community cricket team on the weekends? Or that you obtained extensive work experience in hospitality as an undergraduate? 

The people who read your CV in the context of, for example, a job, prize or grant application, don’t want to know everything about you, just what’s relevant to the job, prize or grant. Including extraneous information creates the impression that you haven’t quite understood the purpose of the CV, that you lack the perspicacity to distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t, or perhaps that you are thoughtlessly recycling, with a few additions, the same CV you’ve been using since school!

Understanding purpose and audience will help you determine what information is relevant and what level of explanatory detail is required. It may also require you to reconsider the structure of your CV. For example, if you’re applying for a teaching award, you’ll want to shift the sections on your teaching experience towards the front of your CV. If you’re applying for a research fellowship, you’ll put the sections on your research experience towards the front.

Remember that your CV will form only part of an application. As such, it must be consistent with the rest of the application. It’s quite common to find that information in, say, an applicant’s responses to selection criteria is not supported, or indeed is undermined, by the information provided in their CV. Most commonly this happens with numbers. For example, you claim 36 publications in one place and 39 in another, or 572 citations in one place and 613 elsewhere; even the start/finish dates of jobs are surprisingly often inconsistent. Readers will usually put these things down to carelessness; but if the discrepancies are considerable, they may conclude that the applicant has made a dishonest attempt to inflate their achievements.

A more subtle problem – harder to detect – is when your CV tells a different overall ‘story’ to the rest of the application. To take a simple example: let’s say you’re applying for a grant where one of the criteria is community engagement. In the main part of your application, you talk about your excellent track record in involving consumers and other members of the community in your research projects. But when it comes to your CV, there is very little evidence of this.

Having written your application and produced the accompanying targeted CV, you should always allow enough time to read them against each other, to check for these kinds of errors in consistency.