What a UK CV is expected to contain, and what to leave out

British convention on this is published rather than folklore. The National Careers Service and nidirect both set it out, and they agree on the parts that matter.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— every claim here carries the page it came from.

Most advice about British CVs is recruiter opinion. Two government services publish guidance instead, and where they say something specific it is worth following, because it is the version an applicant can point at.

The sections

The National Careers Service sets out the contents directly: "Your CV should include a section for your contact details, an introduction, your education history, your work history and references" (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk).

That is five sections, and skills usually appear inside the introduction or alongside the work history rather than as a sixth. A Europass CV arranges the same material differently and is worth using where it is asked for by name. How much room to give each is a judgement, and the skills section page covers the version that earns its place.

Two pages

The nidirect government service recommends "no more than two pages" for a CV (nidirect.gov.uk). This is the most commonly cited British convention and it has a source, which is more than can be said for most of what surrounds it.

Two pages is a real constraint once the work history has a few roles in it. Résumé length covers where the space usually goes and how to recover it without deleting evidence, and how far back to go answers the other half of the question.

What to leave out

The National Careers Service names four things: "You should not include your age, your date of birth, whether you're married or your nationality." nidirect gives a slightly different list, adding salary: "You do not need to put your date of birth, age, or salary on your CV."

This is the sharpest single difference between British and German practice, and American practice sits with the British side on it, where the Bundesagentur für Arbeit asks for date and place of birth as standard. Neither is wrong; they are different conventions with different histories, and the Lebenslauf page has the German side with its own source.

References

The guidance allows a references section where somebody has agreed to provide one, and then adds a rule people often get wrong: "you should not put someone else's contact details on your CV." The alternative it gives is to write that references are available on request.

That protects the referee, and it also keeps two lines of a two-page document for something more useful. The references page covers when to name anybody at all.

The introduction

The one section with no fixed form. Three or four lines saying what you do and what you are looking for, written for this application rather than in general. It is the first thing read and the part most often left over from a previous version of the document, and the summary page covers making it earn its place.

Format, and why single-column is the safe default

Nothing in the published guidance requires a particular layout. What does apply is that most applications now pass through a system that extracts the text before a person reads it, and a two-column layout can be interleaved by that extraction. In the résumé builder here, 21 of the 37 designs are single-column and marked ATS-safe, which means the layout is one column and the text still comes back when it is pulled out of the exported file.

You can check the file you already have rather than guessing: the ATS résumé checker reads the document on its own, uses no job description, and prints what the extraction returned. It is not an employer's applicant tracking system and it does not predict anything.

The covering letter beside it

nidirect advises keeping a covering letter short, with "one A4 page is preferable", and the National Careers Service describes it as three to five paragraphs, tailored to the company and the role. The letter length page has both sources and the arithmetic of what fills a page.

What this page does not claim

It does not tell you what an individual British employer prefers, because that varies and no published source can answer it. Where the guidance is silent, this page is silent: it says nothing about photographs on a UK CV, for example, because neither service addresses them. The photo page sets out what each country's sources actually say.

The public sector asks for something different

A great many British public-sector and charity applications do not want a CV at all. They use an application form with a supporting statement, in which you are asked to address the person specification point by point, and a CV attached instead of that is an application that has not answered the question.

The material is the same and the shape is not. Each point in the specification gets its own short paragraph with evidence against it, in the order the specification lists them. If you are applying across both sectors, keeping the evidence in one place is what makes the two formats cheap to produce, which is the same economy that makes tailoring affordable.