From CV to resume: Formatting is not enough

PhDs should start from scratch to write a good resume

If you have a PhD and are looking for a job outside of academia, you probably already know that you need a resume because industry jobs require them. You might not realize that a CV and a resume are not just different versions of the same information; they are two different documents that do entirely different things.

A curriculum vitae (CV) is a full accounting of your academic accomplishments

Your goal is to showcase you are a deep specialist who has been productive in publishing articles in high-impact journals and giving talks and presentations. Almost every hiring committee asking for a CV cares about the same things, except for the area of specialty. Here are the defining features of a CV:

1. The format is standardized: Everything from the spacing to the content order is the same for every CV; even the font doesn’t change much from one person to another. The bulk of the content is made up of academic achievements (mostly peer-reviewed publications), but it can also include poster presentations, talks, book chapters, awards, and other accolades. If you want to get a tenure track professorship in a top research university, publications are your main measure of success: how many publications you have overall, how many of those you were the first or second author, and how big of a deal the journals you published in are, measured by their impact factor.
2. The content is comprehensive: Generally, you would share everything you have done academically after high school, even if it’s not relevant to the job you’re applying for. You can roughly tell the level of experience a person has by the length of their CV. Before getting a PhD in psychology, I worked in a chemistry lab as an assistant and have two 4th-author publications to my name about nitric acid photolysis. That would never leave my CV even if I were searching for psychology roles.
3. The phrasing is objective: The way that information is documented leaves very little room for interpretation. Articles you publish must be documented in a standard format, and you don’t get to add comments about them. You will have 1 version of your CV forever, only adding to it as you do more things.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

A resume tells a story about why you are perfect for a specific role

Your goal is to show that your skills from previous experience are transferable to the job. It is up to you to either know, intuit or guess what the job is looking for and tell a compelling story about why your background makes you a good fit. It doesn’t have to be perfect and you definitely shouldn’t lie, but you have the flexibility to interpret your experience as you see fit. People that are hiring for a role may have a “perfect” candidate in mind, but in reality, there is a lot of flexibility in their decision. Compare the characteristics of a CV with those of a resume:

1. No unbreakable formatting rules, other than it needs to have your contact information. It’s up to you what other content about you to include, where to put it, and how it looks. However, each industry has its norms for what to write, which tend to always include your experience and education. Different sectors and geographies will have varying cultural norms. The design industry permits and even encourages some level of visual flair, whereas the legal world is more conservative.
2. The content is a limited selection of information about your experience, selected by you to represent what you think makes you the best fit for the job you want. You might have a different resume for every role you apply for! Unless you don’t have enough content to fill out a page, it’s usually in your best interest to remove content that doesn’t fit your narrative for why you should get the job. There is some debate about whether resumes can be more than 1–2 pages. That debate does not apply to someone applying to their first industry job from academia: keep it to 1 page. You don’t need that many words, and the recruiter won’t read them. If you don’t believe your years of work can be summarized in 1 page, google “Elon Musk 1 page resume” for inspiration.
3. Your experience and accomplishments are flexible: Don’t lie about your experience. But you can talk about the same experience in several different ways, adapting how you frame the responsibilities, the actions you took, and the results you highlight depending on the job you’re applying for. If you created a different resume for two different job applications (which you should), your experience in your last role could appear totally different on these two versions, if you believe each job is looking for something different.

I hope it’s clear how formatting is only the surface-level difference between these two documents. If you changed up the formatting of a CV to look like a resume without meaningfully changing the content, I can basically guarantee you won’t have success looking for industry jobs unless all they’re looking for is a warm body to fill a seat. If you have a CV and want to get a job outside of academia, you need to either fully transform it into a resume or build one from scratch.

If you found this helpful and want more, join my mailing list!