CV examples by job title

A good CV example puts first what readers in its field check first. Most employers give a CV a quick scan before they read it properly, and what they scan for changes from field to field. Use the notes below with the examples above, starting with the field you’re aiming for. If your field isn’t here, take the nearest one: every reader is asking what you handled, how much of it and how well.

Healthcare: licenses and clinical settings

Nurse managers and clinic leads look for your license, certifications and the units or settings you’ve worked in. Put them near the top, name the patient groups you’ve cared for and give a sense of scale, such as the size of the unit or your usual patient load.

Finance and accounting: scale and accuracy

Readers want to know the size of what you handled: accounts, budgets, month-end closes. Lines with amounts and deadlines met carry more weight than a list of duties, and naming the accounting or reporting systems you use saves the reader a question.

Engineering and technical work: projects and tools

Describe projects by type and size, and name the software, standards and licenses you work with. A reader should see what you built, what you built it with and what happened once it was finished.

Data and analytics: what each analysis changed

Analytics managers look for the questions you answered as much as the tools. Pair each tool with an outcome, such as a report a team acted on, a process you sped up or a cost you found, so the reader sees the analysis led somewhere.

Education: what and whom you’ve taught

Schools look for your certification, the grades and subjects you’ve taught and how you supported students. One line on progress, such as reading gains across a class, helps a lot.

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Sales and marketing: targets and channels

Hiring managers look for targets hit, revenue or leads generated and the channels you used. Put the figure near the start of each line so it stands out on a quick read.

Office and admin roles: range and accuracy

Office managers look for the range of tasks you juggle and how reliably you handle them: calendars, records, invoices and the software you use every day. A line on volume, such as how many people you supported, shows the scale of the job.

Trades and logistics: licenses, equipment and safety

Supervisors look for your licenses and certificates, the equipment or vehicles you’re cleared to use and your safety record. Say what you maintained, moved or built and how much of it, such as routes driven each day or machines serviced each week.

Hospitality and customer service: volume and calm

Managers look for the size of the property or team, the pace you worked at and the systems you used. Show how you handled busy shifts and kept guests happy, and name any service score or rating you were measured on.

Research jobs outside a university

Name your techniques, instruments and software in the lines where you used them. The postdoctoral fellow example shows how a research background reads on a job CV. Add a line on what the work was for, since a hiring manager outside a university cares about the product or decision it fed.

Grad school CVs: education and research first

A graduate school CV is a short academic CV, and it runs longer than a job CV. It leads with education, then research experience, presentations, honors, and relevant work or volunteering. A faculty CV goes further, with publications, grants and teaching. Our guide sets out the order a grad school CV follows.

Medical CVs: training and licensure

A medical CV for a residency or hospital post opens with medical school and postgraduate training, then licensure and any board certification, clinical rotations, research, publications and professional memberships. Give exact dates for every post, name the body that issued each license, and ask the program which order it prefers.

Found the example closest to your next job? Choose one of our CV templates and fill it in with that example open alongside.