How long should a CV be?

Length by where you are in your career

Length should follow the amount of relevant evidence you have, not the amount of time you have been working.

• Student, school leaver or graduate: one page. Education, projects, placements and part-time work fit comfortably.
• Two to ten years of experience: two pages. Recent roles get the space; older ones shrink to a line or two.
• Senior or 15+ years: two pages still works. Summarise early roles into a short 'earlier career' block.
• Academic, medical or research: as long as the field expects, with publications and clinical detail in their own sections.

What to cut first

Almost every long CV is long for the same handful of reasons. Work down this list before you shrink the font.

• Duties that any holder of the job title would do — keep the results only you produced.
• Roles more than 15 years old, unless they are directly relevant to the job you want.
• GCSE-level detail once you have a degree or several years of work.
• Skill lists of soft adjectives. Evidence them in bullets instead.
• Full addresses, dates of birth, marital status and photos — none are needed on a UK CV.

Never shrink the layout to fit

Dropping to 8pt type, removing all white space or squeezing everything into columns makes a CV harder for a person to read and can confuse a parser that relies on clear section headings.

If the content genuinely will not fit, the answer is fewer bullets, not smaller ones. Every A4 template in CinnoVate keeps readable spacing and lets you spread content across pages properly.

Common questions