Print This PostFor reasons I won’t get into now I’ve been contemplating my CV a lot recently. I’ve re-written it and re-worded it, I’ve made it more approachable and less approachable. The latter not on purpose, obviously. And I realised that whilst I had written about the narrative CV approach, that wasn’t particularly inclusive or helpful for those ECRs reading who might be contemplating a move away from academia. The narrative CV is used in fellowship applications but almost nowhere else, and even the academic CV is not what most people would consider ‘normal’. So today we’re going to look at a series of facts and use them to discuss how to start thinking about adjusting your CV to suit positions outside of academia.
Before we start, let’s consider the purpose of a CV. The phrase curriculum vitae actually means ‘course of life’. It was first introduced in around the 16th century to allow scholars to basically show their credentials by giving people a detailed history of their work. Today, we use the phrases CV and résumé interchangeably. According to the internet (and a bunch of non-academic friends I checked with) résumé is a little more American but broadly the terms refer to the same kind of document. The purpose of the document is to give the reader an idea of who you are as a person, your job history and your skills, in a way that allows them to assess your suitability for a particular job. This is important, remember it, we will come back to it shortly.
Outside of academia, these documents are generally 1-2 pages. As an interesting exercise, find a friend who doesn’t work in academia and ask them to send you their CV and see how sparse it looks compared to yours where you’re frenetically craming everything down to 8-point font because you desperately want to include the poster prize you won as a masters student and the membership of that obscure society. Because within academia they can become insane.
I once had to append a professor’s CV to an application and they had not specified a length so he sent me his original CV. It was 108 pages. This is all well and good but as we’ve already mentioned the purpose of a CV is to assess your suitability for something. Could we have done that in 10 pages instead of 100? Almost certainly.
So, let’s get into how.
Fact 1. You need to adjust your CV to suit the job you’re applying to. This one might seem obvious but if you’re considering applying for a job outside of academia within a couple of years of your PhD then you need to think about where you’re applying and what you’re applying for. The same advice goes for any cover letters you write. You cannot make one static CV and one cover letter and just cookie-cutter in the name of the company and assume this is good enough. Sadly, job hunting and job acquiring are disturbingly time-consuming activities and require you to put in a little effort. I have friends in high up places in various industries and they say there’s nothing that puts them off interviewing someone more than when they see a cover letter or CV that doesn’t highlight how that person is a good fit for the job advertised. Yes, your CV is supposed to be a reflection of you but, as mentioned above, it’s also supposed to be a way to highlight how you are uniquely qualified to do that particular job. Which brings us on to…
According to LinkedIn’s 2022 data, a well-crafted CV can increase your interview chances by over 30%. Tailoring your CV specifically to the job description significantly enhances the likelihood of passing the automated tracking systems many companies use to filter applications.
Fact 2. You need to carefully consider what information you include. This doesn’t mean lie about what you can or cannot do. For those of you who are old enough to remember, there’s an episode of Friends where Joey claims on his CV to be able to speak French and then gets a job based on it and has to frenetically try (and fail) to learn French. Don’t do that. But if you’re applying for a job in academic or medical writing, or medical affairs, for example, they might not need to know how much prowess you have in doing Western blots and qPCR. What they will need to know is how well you can write, which brings us on to a contentious….
Fact 3. Nobody cares about your papers. This is not strictly true but I hear it so often that it’s worth repeating and then explaining. What it really means is that if you’re moving into something like the pharmaceutical industry, or a small biotech startup, nobody will care how much you’ve published or where you’ve published or which authorship position you’re in. What they will care about is that you can work collaboratively, that you can write concisely and well, and that you can respond to criticism. Which is essentially what paper writing is. If you’re moving into something like medical writing they might care more about your papers. As with the previous jobs they won’t really care about where or how much you’ve published but they might care about where you were in the authorship team. More first authorships mean you were driving more of the writing, more senior authorships mean you were driving more of the conceptualisation and editing. Hopefully you can see how these are slightly different skills and if you’re going into medical writing then highlighting them might be important in that context. If, however, you’re going into a job where you’ll need to be optimizing a new ELISA then really, nobody will care about your papers.
Fact 4. Nobody cares about your grants. This is along the same lines as the papers. Yes, you’ve bought in several million over a whole bunch of years but actually, what does that mean? In biotech, what that means is that you can manage large budgets. What it means is you can write in an approachable way. What it means is you have run successful funding bids. What it means is that you have worked with a team of people all the way from other scientists to the crew in the finance office. Again, figure out what job you’re applying for and select out what your funding says about you rather than listing every single travel grant you’ve ever got.
Fact 5. You need to sell yourself, but do it quickly and succinctly. When any company advertises it expects some degree of interest. We’ve struggled in recent years in academia to recruit, with many people turning away from the precarity and poor pay. But in biotech or non-academic fields like editing or writing or medical affairs, this is often not the case. These careers are seen as more stable and better long-term prospects for many people so that each job advert is likely to garner interest from a lot of people, and each of those people will come from a different background and be qualified in a different way. For example, if I advertise for an RA, I want that person to have specific skills: neuroscience background, experience with histology, experience doing in vivo work, experience with molecular biology, etc. There are only a handful of people who might fill this brief. But if a medical writing company advertises for a junior medical writer to join the team, they can get people from all backgrounds; neuroscientists, immunologists, cancer biologists, bioengineers. And these people will all bring different skills to the table so what you need to do is rapidly sell yourself to the person reviewing the CVs. They might have 50 or more applications to read and if each CV is five pages and doesn’t get to the point until page four, they’re likely to get bored quickly and drop you in the reject pile.
Fact 6. You need some better buzz-words. I was made aware of this recently during a talk with a senior academic who said someone had looked at his CV and his LinkedIn page and told him nobody would want to employ him because it wasn’t really obvious what he was good at. This man was a professor at Oxford and a consultant clinician, clearly good at his job but clearly poor at communicating it. And this is where we once again highlight the importance of translatable skills. In my brain I am a (relatively) senior academic research scientist which means I know a whole lot about really niche things to do with the brain, I have published quite a lot of papers and got some decent grants. What this actually means is that I have managed interdisciplinary teams, I have lead and mentored junior team members, I have developed and managed large project budgets, I have authored protocols, reports, risk assessments and standard operating procedures. I have done things that are likely to involve the word ‘strategic’.
So, how do we actually go about putting all of these adjustments together as a coherent CV which isn’t 108 pages long? I’ll give you roughly what my ‘standard CV’ now looks like and you can use it as inspiration.
A brief introductory paragraph. I’ve called this a ‘career profile’ but it doesn’t have to have a title. It describes me not as an associate professor of neuroimmunology but as a group leader. It outlines my experience and values in around four lines so people get a rapid sense of who I am. My next section is titled ‘relevant skills’. The subtitles are ‘communication’, ‘project management’, ‘data management’ and ‘research skills’. Each of the sections has some facts, preferably involving numbers, highlighting my experience and skills. ‘>15 years research experience in neuroimmunology’ or ‘>10 years independent management of grants’. As mentioned above, depending on the job, these sections will be shuffled around to more effectively highlight what the employer wants – is it leadership skills or is it lab skills? My next section is titled ‘professional experience’ and it, along with the next section on ‘education’. are the only hang-ups from my academic CV. I list my employment history followed by my degrees. I have then got a very brief ‘publications’ section. For me, the idea here is to demonstrate that I have extensive experience in my field, not to highlight where or what I’ve published so I have included ‘5 of 47’ and directed them to PubMed for the remainder should they wish to find them.
And that’s pretty much it. It’s only two pages but it’s got all the right buzzwords and tells people that I can write for a variety of audiences, that I can manage and lead (very different things), that I am flexible and adaptable, that I can assimilate and present data. Frankly, who wouldn’t want to employ me? All of these things just make me a lot more saleable to a lot more people because these skills are valuable and a lot of people genuinely don’t have them. So if you have those skills too and you feel like academia isn’t valuing them, think about adjusting how you present them and take them elsewhere.
Dr Yvonne Couch
Author
Dr Yvonne Couch is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.
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