CV vs resume: what’s the difference?

"CV" (curriculum vitae) is used in two different senses:

• The everyday CV — in the UK, Ireland and most of Europe, the one- or two-page document you send with any job application. It is what Americans call a resume.
• The academic CV — a long, complete record of education, research, publications, teaching, grants and presentations, used for academic, research and some medical positions everywhere.

A "resume" (or résumé) is always the short, tailored document. The confusion comes from mixing up the everyday CV and the academic one.

The names explain the difference. Curriculum vitae is Latin for “the course of life”, which fits the complete academic record. Résumé is French for “summary”, which fits a document cut down to what matters for one job.

Even where the words differ, a UK CV and an American resume do the same job. The real differences are conventions:

1. Change the paper size from US Letter to A4 and check nothing has spilled onto a new page.
2. Switch to British spelling: organise, programme, centre, licence (as a noun).
3. Rename the summary as a personal statement and make it about the UK role.
4. Let it run to two pages if your experience supports it. One page is not expected in the UK.
5. Change dates to UK style if you used numbers (09/2024 means something different on each side of the Atlantic); “Sep 2024” avoids the problem.
6. Replace US-specific terms with their UK equivalents, such as GPA with your degree classification and “high school” with A-levels or equivalent.
7. Add a right-to-work line if a UK employer might wonder.

1. Change the paper size to US Letter.
2. Cut to one page unless you are senior or highly technical. Remove older roles and reduce bullets to the strongest three or four per job.
3. Switch to American spelling: organize, program, center, license.
4. Rename the personal statement as a summary and shorten it to two or three lines.
5. Remove references and any mention of them.
6. Explain UK qualifications briefly, for example “BSc Economics (First Class Honours, the highest UK classification)”.

Universities, research institutes, funders and some medical posts ask for the academic CV. It has no page limit by default and its sections are fairly standard:

• Education, including thesis titles and supervisors
• Academic appointments
• Publications, grouped by type and usually numbered
• Grants and funding, with amounts and your role
• Teaching and supervision
• Conference talks and invited presentations
• Awards, service (reviewing, committees) and professional memberships

Funders often cap the length for grant applications even though academic CVs are normally open-ended, so check each call. The Academic & Research template uses this structure.

Here is one research role written as a US resume entry, a UK CV entry and an academic CV entry. The facts are the same; what changes is the emphasis, the vocabulary and the level of detail.

The resume is tightest and leads with results. The UK CV has room for a third point and uses British spelling. The academic CV barely describes the job and instead lists the outputs a hiring committee counts.

Doctors sit between the everyday and the academic CV. In the UK and Ireland a medical CV usually covers registration, clinical posts, audits and quality improvement projects, teaching, research and courses, and often runs to several pages. In the US, physicians use a CV rather than a resume for hospital and academic posts. Nurses and allied health professionals generally use a standard resume or CV with a strong licensing section.

• Use the word the job ad uses — if it asks for a CV, send a CV, formatted for that country.
• Adjust length, paper size, spelling and personal details to the destination, not where you are from.
• Keep one master document with everything, and produce a tailored version for each market.

OpusStride’s templates are grouped by region — US, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia & NZ — and you can move the same content between them without retyping it.