Some employers will want to see that you know how to follow strict guidelines for academic writing. Be sure to list your published work properly. To learn the appropriate style for your industry, consult the bibliography section of a style guide that’s commonly used in your field, or look at how bibliographies are presented in your trade publications
Bonus Check
Not all curriculum vitae are long documents. For instance, a new Ph.D. graduate might start out with a three-pager that will grow as he progresses in his career.
Joining the Team
If you’ve been selected to serve on one or more committees, consider creating a section entitled Committees, Appointments, Boards, or the like. Under your heading, list the following:
- Your titles
- Names of committees
- The city and state of each committee
- Dates you served on the committees
If appropriate, you could include bullet-point statements that say what results were achieved during your tenure. For instance
President, University of Colorado Alumni Association, 1997-99
- Designed the organization’s first Web site, which enabled online member giving.
- Collaborated with Board to develop the Annual Alumni Scholarship Award.
Hanging with the Right Folks
The associations that you belong to can be listed alphabetically, chronologically, or in order of relevance to your profession. You could call this section something like Professional Affiliations, Professional Associations, or Professional Memberships. If you held or currently hold an office, note that in this section also.
Job-Hunt Hint
In your CV, list organizations to which you previously belonged, along with the ones you currently participate in.
Forget Anything?
Here are some other headings that might appear on your CV:
- Exhibitions
- Awards and Honors
- Research
- Studies
- Grants
- Lectures
- Teaching
- Licenses
- Media Appearances
Remember, more is more when it comes to your CV, so think hard about all that you can include.
Career Casualty
If you have just one item to list under a heading, make sure the name of the heading is singular, not plural (for example, Professional Affiliation, not Professional Affiliations)
High Marks for a University Instructor
Ruth Schwartz used the following curriculum vitae to apply for college-level positions teaching Creative Writing. She realized that her main strength lay in her numerous publications and awards, and her weakness was that she had only one year of teaching at the university level. Therefore, she highlighted her list of publications by putting it on the first page of her CV. That way readers would already be impressed by the time they reached her rather meager teaching section, which began near the bottom of page four.
Job-Hunt Hint To indicate that a laundry list on your CV does not include every single item in that category, add “Selected” or “Relevant” in the heading, for instance, Selected Present actions or Relevant Present actions.
