Common issues when writing about yourself

• Be confident when writing about yourself. Don’t undersell yourself, but likewise, avoid exaggeration.

• If writing about yourself is uncomfortable, write about your achievements imagining you are talking about a friend or colleague.

• Always have another pair of eyes review your work.

• CVs are not static documents so ensure they are updated for every audience. 

• Take time to ensure your CV is clear and legible. 

Read time: 3 min

Many people find it easier to write about anything but themselves! Even very successful people can struggle to present their achievements with confidence; some also experience the self-doubt of ‘imposter syndrome’. On the other hand, there are those who use exaggeration and bluster to talk themselves up, which can be embarrassingly transparent.

The tone you should strive to achieve when writing about yourself is neither underconfident nor overconfident – just confident. This can take several attempts. 

If you know that you tend to lack confidence when talking or writing about yourself, try to overcompensate in the first draft of your CV or track record by going ‘over the top’. You may have to psyche yourself into the right frame of mind; perhaps choose a moment when you have achieved something important and are feeling on top of the world. In subsequent drafts, your natural disposition will lead you to modify any claims that are truly excessive.

Another common, and effective, strategy is pretending you are not writing about yourself but about an esteemed, well-liked colleague who happens to work in your field and whose achievements (which are, in reality, yours) you are very familiar with. Often the ‘distance’ between you and your achievements introduced by this simple step is enough to allow you to write a solid, balanced CV or track record section. 

Getting someone to review your work 

Before you submit anything to a selection committee, always ask someone else to review your CV and/or track record (along with the rest of your application, if possible). Better still, ask more than one person to review it – different people notice different things.

Be careful who you choose to do this. You want a person who can bring a critical eye to the task – so probably not your best friend. You also want someone who can provide constructive feedback – it’s often very easy to see what’s wrong, but much harder to know how to fix it. Finally, you want someone who will take the time to understand the job, prize or funding scheme you’re applying for – because one size does not fit all.

If you want to be competitive, you will need to tailor your CV and/or track record to the requirements of the job, prize, grant or whatever it is you’re applying for. This doesn’t mean you have to rewrite everything from scratch with every application. It does mean, though, that you will need to ‘repurpose’ your base material and, often, frame your professional experience accordingly. For this reason, it’s important not to underestimate how long the task will take you.

To streamline this process, we recommend establishing a single master CV from which you can then easily create targeted CVs as often as required.

Academic CVs tend to prioritise content over form, often amounting to little more than pages of lists, which can be difficult to read and navigate. These days, a CV should be a visually-attractive document that is easy to read and easy to skim, so readers can quicky find the information they’re looking for. 

You can download well-designed templates from the internet, which are often free. Although content is more important, a well-designed document enhances readability and enables you to clearly get across the message you want readers to get about you, your skills and expertise. 

Ensure that you adhere to any formatting requirements of whatever it is you’re applying for. Generally, you can design a CV however you wish, whereas the options for track records are far more limited. But even introducing adequate paragraph spacing, tidy bullet lists, treating the first page of your CV as the most crucial, and ensuring heading levels are visually differentiated, will make a difference.