How to Write a CV in the UK: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to write a CV for UK employers, section by section. Learn the UK conventions (no photo, no date of birth, two pages), what to put in your personal statement, skills, experience and education, how to get past applicant tracking systems, and how to tailor your CV to each advert.

By Tony Musso on Sat Oct 24 2026

A good CV does one job: it gets you an interview. Recruiters often skim a CV in under a minute before deciding whether to read it properly, so yours needs to show, quickly and clearly, that you can do the job in the advert. That's less about clever design and more about choosing the right content, putting it in the right order and cutting everything else.

This guide walks through how to write a CV for UK employers, section by section, with short examples you can adapt. It covers the conventions that differ from other countries, how to get past applicant tracking systems, and the mistakes that most often cost people interviews. If you'd rather fill in the sections as you go, CV Studio, our online CV builder, lays them out in the right order for you.

UK CV conventions to know first

UK CVs follow a few unwritten rules. Some are about fairness, since employers shouldn't be making decisions on age or appearance, and some are simply habit.

Do	Don't
Keep it to two sides of A4 (one is fine early in your career)	Add a photo
Use reverse-chronological order, most recent first	Include your date of birth, age or marital status
Give your town or city, phone and email	Give your full home address (town and postcode area is plenty)
Write a short personal statement at the top	Write "References available on request"
Save as Word or PDF, as the advert asks	Use "Curriculum Vitae" as the heading (use your name)

You don't need to state your nationality. If you have the right to work in the UK and think an employer might wonder, a single line such as "Full right to work in the UK" is enough. Our guide to the right to work in the UK explains what employers check.

How to write a CV, section by section

1. Name and contact details

Put your name at the top in a slightly larger font, then a single line underneath with your phone number, a professional email address, your town or city, and a LinkedIn link if your profile is up to date.

Priya Shah 07700 900123 · priya.shah@email.com · Leeds · linkedin.com/in/priyashah

2. Personal statement

This is three to five lines that sum up who you are, what you offer and what you're looking for. It's the first thing a recruiter reads, so make it specific to the role rather than a list of adjectives.

Customer service team leader with six years' experience in busy retail and contact centre settings. I train new starters, handle escalated complaints and have cut call-back times by reorganising shift patterns. Now looking for an operations supervisor role where I can manage a larger team.

Avoid phrases like "hard-working team player who can also work independently". Every candidate says it. Our full guide to writing a CV personal statement has examples for different career stages.

3. Key skills

A short list of six to eight skills that match the advert. Mix practical skills (software, licences, languages, techniques) with the softer ones the employer has asked for, and make sure you can back each one up further down the CV.

Rota planning · Complaint resolution · Microsoft Excel · Training and coaching · Stock control · Full UK driving licence

4. Work experience

List your jobs in reverse-chronological order. For each one, give your job title, the employer, the location and the dates (month and year is enough). Then add three to six bullet points about what you did and achieved.

The strongest bullet points start with a verb and say what changed because of you:

Weak: Responsible for answering customer emails.
Better: Answered around 60 customer emails a day and wrote template replies that the whole team now uses.

Use real numbers where you have them, but never inflate them. Interviewers often ask about anything that sounds impressive. Older or less relevant jobs can be cut to a single line each, or grouped under "Earlier roles".

5. Education and qualifications

Again, most recent first. Graduates usually put education above work experience; most other people put it below. Give the qualification, the institution and the year. For GCSEs, a summary line is fine: "9 GCSEs including English and maths". Add professional qualifications and relevant short courses here too, or in a separate "Training" section if you have several.

6. Optional sections

Add these only if they help your case:

Volunteering, especially if it fills a gap or shows relevant skills
Languages, with an honest level (for example "conversational Spanish")
Interests, but only specific ones that say something about you. "Reading and socialising" adds nothing; "Run a weekly junior football session" does

There's no need for a references section. Employers will ask for referees when they make an offer.

Make your CV ATS-friendly

Many employers and agencies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to sort applications. These read your CV as text and look for the skills and job titles in the advert. A CV that looks lovely to a person can come out scrambled.

Use standard headings such as "Work experience", "Education" and "Skills", so the system knows where each section starts.
Keep the layout simple. Avoid putting important information in tables, text boxes, headers, footers or images, as some systems skip them.
Use a common font such as Arial or Calibri, at 10 to 12 point.
Mirror the advert's wording. If the advert says "stakeholder management", use that phrase rather than "working with partners", as long as it's true.
Name the file properly, for example "Priya-Shah-CV.pdf".

Our CV templates are built with clean, readable layouts that work for both people and tracking systems.

Tailor your CV to each advert

Sending the same CV to every job is the most common reason good candidates don't hear back. Tailoring doesn't mean rewriting everything. It means:

Reading the advert and the job description closely and highlighting the essential criteria.
Rewriting your personal statement so it speaks to that role.
Reordering your skills and bullet points so the most relevant come first.
Adding evidence for anything essential that isn't already on your CV.

It takes ten or fifteen minutes per application, and it makes a real difference. Keep a full "master" CV with everything on it, and cut it down for each job. If you need a covering letter too, our cover letter templates follow the same approach.

Common CV mistakes

Spelling and grammar errors. Read it aloud, use a spellchecker set to UK English and ask someone else to check it.
Unexplained gaps. A short line such as "Career break to care for a family member" is better than leaving a recruiter to guess.
Listing duties instead of results. Say what you achieved, not only what was in your job description.
Going over two pages. Cut older roles and repeated points first.
Inconsistent formatting. Keep dates, fonts and bullet styles the same throughout.
Lying or stretching the truth. Qualifications and dates are easy to check, and a false claim can cost you the job even after you've started.

If you're moving into a different field, the structure shifts slightly to put transferable skills first. Our guide to the career change CV shows how. And for a feel of what a finished CV looks like in your field, browse our CV examples.

Ready to put it together? CV Studio walks you through each section in the right order and gives you a clean, ATS-friendly layout you can download.

Build your CV in CV Studio