How to Write a CV in 2026: A Section-by-Section Guide

Most CV advice is a list of adjectives you should apparently be. This is not that. This is what goes in each section, in what order, and why — plus the parts people spend the most time on that matter least.

The premise worth stating up front: your CV has two readers, and they want different things. The first is software that parses text into database fields. The second is a human who will spend somewhere between six and thirty seconds deciding whether to read it properly. A CV that only satisfies one of them fails.

The order of sections

Put them in this order unless you have a specific reason not to:

1. Contact details
2. Professional summary (three or four lines)
3. Work experience, most recent first
4. Education
5. Skills
6. Anything else that genuinely helps — projects, certifications, languages

Two exceptions. If you are a student or recent graduate, education moves above experience, because it is the strongest thing you have. If you are changing career, a slightly longer summary earns its place, because the reader needs a sentence explaining why a marketer is applying for a data role before your experience section confuses them.

Everything else about ordering is noise. Recruiters read top-to-bottom and stop when they lose interest, so the rule is simply: strongest material highest.

Contact details

Name, phone, email, city, and one or two links. That is the whole section.

Some specifics that matter more than they should:

• Use a professional email address. firstname.lastname@ is fine. A nickname from 2009 is a small, avoidable signal.
• City and country, not your street address. Nobody posts letters, and a full address is personal data sitting in a stranger's inbox and applicant database.
• Skip the photo unless you are applying in a country where it is standard (Germany historically, though this is changing). In the UK and US it invites bias claims and many systems strip images anyway.
• No date of birth, marital status, or nationality unless legally required where you are applying.

The professional summary

Three or four lines at the top saying what you do, how long you have done it, and what you are best at. Not a mission statement.

The test for a good summary is whether it could describe someone else. If yes, rewrite it.

Weak: "Hardworking and detail-oriented professional with a passion for excellence, seeking a challenging role in a dynamic organisation."

Better: "Backend engineer, six years, mostly payments infrastructure in Node.js and Go. Led a monolith-to-services migration that cut checkout latency 40% while keeping settlement exactly-once. Comfortable owning a system from schema design through on-call."

The second one is specific enough to be false, which is exactly what makes it worth reading. Every phrase in the first could belong to anyone.

Work experience: the section that decides everything

For each role: job title, company, location, and dates. Then two to five bullets.

The bullets are where CVs are won and lost, and there is one rule that fixes most of them — write what you achieved, not what you were responsible for.

"Responsible for" describes your job description. Anyone with that title had the same responsibilities. What distinguishes you is the outcome.

Duty: "Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts."

Achievement: "Grew Instagram from 2k to 31k followers in fourteen months by shifting from product posts to short customer-story video, which became the channel's top-performing format."

Use numbers, but do not invent them

Numbers work because they are checkable. Percentages, timeframes, team sizes, budgets, volumes, before-and-after figures.

If you genuinely do not have a number, describe scope instead — "across three regional teams", "for a catalogue of ~40,000 SKUs". This is far better than inventing a statistic you cannot defend, because the follow-up question in the interview is always "tell me more about that 40%", and a made-up figure collapses immediately.

A structure that works

Strong bullets tend to follow action → what you did → result:

• Cut p95 checkout latency from 1.9s to 1.1s by replacing synchronous provider calls with a queued settlement worker.
• Reduced CI integration failures from 18% to under 2% by introducing contract tests between services.

Start with a verb. Put the result early — the reader may not finish the sentence.

Employment gaps

State them briefly and move on. "Career break — caregiving, 2023–2024" is a complete explanation. Gaps are extremely common now and an unexplained hole invites worse assumptions than the truth almost ever does.

Education

Degree, institution, and years. Add your grade if it is good or if you are early in your career; drop it once you have five years of experience and the work speaks louder.

Once you have a degree, remove your secondary school results. Nobody reads them and they date you.

Skills

Group them so the reader can scan. "Languages: TypeScript, Go, SQL." "Tools: Docker, Terraform, AWS." Grouped skills are read; a forty-item comma soup is skipped entirely.

Two things to avoid:

• Rating bars and star ratings. They mean nothing consistent — your four out of five is someone else's three — and image-based ratings are invisible to an ATS.
• Listing things you cannot discuss. Everything on this list is fair game for a question. If you would not want to be asked about it, take it off.

What to leave out

• "References available on request" — assumed, and wastes a line
• A skills rating chart
• Every job from twenty years ago (last 10–15 years is plenty)
• Hobbies, unless genuinely relevant to the role
• The word "CV" as a heading on your CV
• Personal pronouns throughout — CV convention drops "I"

Formatting: the part that decides whether a machine can read you

This is where good content gets quietly destroyed. Applicant tracking systems parse text; anything that is not simple text tends to be mangled or dropped.

• One column. Two-column layouts are the single most common cause of scrambled parsing, because the extractor reads straight across and interleaves your two columns into nonsense.
• Standard section headings. "Work Experience", not "My Journey". The parser is looking for known labels.
• Real text, not an image. A beautifully designed CV exported as a picture extracts as nothing at all.
• A common font, 10–12pt, and consistent spacing.
• PDF, unless the posting explicitly asks for .docx.
• No text inside headers, footers, or text boxes — commonly skipped entirely.

We wrote about the parsing failures in more detail in what ATS-friendly actually means.

Length

One page under roughly five years of experience. Two pages beyond that. Three almost never — a third page mostly buries what you wanted read.

If you are over, cut old roles down to a single line each rather than shrinking the font to 8pt. Dense unreadable text is worse than a second page.

Tailor it, at least a little

You do not need a fresh CV per application. You do need the top third to match the job.

Read the posting, note the three or four things it actually asks for, and make sure those appear in your summary and top bullets in the posting's own language. If it says "stakeholder management" and your CV says "client liaison", change it — both a keyword search and a skim-reading human are looking for the first phrase.

Before you send it

• Read it aloud. Awkward sentences are audible when they are invisible.
• Check dates line up and nothing overlaps by accident.
• Spellcheck, then reread — spellcheck passes "manger" for "manager".
• Save as Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf, not cv_final_v3.pdf.
• Copy the PDF text into a plain text editor. If it comes out scrambled, an ATS sees the same scramble. Fix the layout, not the wording.

Then practise saying it

A finished CV is a list of claims you have just committed to defending. Almost everyone writes bullets they cannot then discuss fluently out loud — the gap between knowing something and explaining it in ninety seconds is real, and silent rehearsal does not close it.

The most useful thing you can do the day after finishing your CV is to have someone ask you about it. Then answer out loud, badly, until you stop being bad at it.