Professional CV Writing Service

This page covers UK and international conventions. If you are applying in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or the wider Gulf, the rules are genuinely different and those pages cover them: personal details are expected there, a photo is standard, and length runs longer. Sending the wrong version to the wrong market is the most common single error we correct.

What a UK CV contains

1. 1Header. Name, phone, professional email, LinkedIn URL, and city with region. A full street address is unnecessary and dated.
2. 2Professional summary. Three to five lines: your discipline, years of experience, sector and the scale you work at. Tailored per application. Not an objective statement, which describes what you want rather than what you offer.
3. 3Core competencies. A compact block of eight to twelve skills and technologies, using the posting’s own terminology. This is what keyword searching reads most directly.
4. 4Professional experience. Reverse chronological. Job title, employer, location, MM/YYYY dates, a one-line company description if the employer is not well known, then four to six achievement bullets.
5. 5Education. Degree, institution, year, and classification if it is a 2:1 or above. Beyond ten years into a career this compresses to one or two lines.
6. 6Certifications and professional membership. With issuing body and, where they expire, the expiry date.
7. 7Optional closing sections. Publications, languages, volunteering, or technical projects, where genuinely relevant. Interests are usually filler and can be cut for space without loss.

What to leave out

UK convention excludes a specific set of information for legal and cultural reasons, and including it marks a CV as either overseas-written or out of date.

• Photograph. UK employers frequently discard CVs with photos to reduce discrimination risk. This is the exact reverse of Gulf practice.
• Date of birth and age.
• Marital status, dependants and gender.
• Nationality, unless you need to clarify your right to work, in which case one line stating it is enough.
• Full home address. City and region is sufficient.
• “References available on request.” Assumed, and it wastes a line.
• Every role from twenty years ago in full. Compress early career to one line each.

How ATS parsing actually works

There is a persistent myth that applicant tracking systems score CVs and auto-reject below a threshold. Most do not. What they do is parse your document into structured fields (name, employers, dates, skills) and store it so recruiters can search.

That makes the real failure mode invisibility rather than rejection. If your CV parses badly, your five years of Python experience might land in the wrong field or nowhere at all, and you simply do not appear when a recruiter searches for it.

• Avoid columns, tables and text boxes. The single biggest cause of scrambled parsing, because parsers read left to right across the page rather than down each column.
• Keep contact details out of the header and footer. Many parsers ignore those regions entirely.
• Use standard section headings. “Work Experience”, not “Where I Have Made An Impact”.
• Consistent MM/YYYY dates. Mixed formats create phantom employment gaps in the parsed record.
• Spell out acronyms once alongside the short form. A search for “chartered accountant” will not match a CV that only says ACA.
• Submit Word unless PDF is requested. Modern systems handle PDF well; older ones still do not.

Responsibilities versus achievements

This is the difference between a CV that describes a job and one that describes a person. A responsibility tells the reader what the role involved, which they could infer from the title. An achievement tells them what changed because you held it.

Four questions to test any bullet: how much, how many, over what period, compared to what. If none of them can be answered, the bullet is describing a duty. Not every line needs a number, but a CV where no line has one gives the reader nothing to size you against.

Writing for other markets

• Gulf (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar). Two pages, photo standard, personal details including nationality and visa status expected. Covered in detail on the Dubai and Abu Dhabi pages.
• United States. One to two pages, called a resume, no personal details, heavy emphasis on quantified metrics. Academic CVs are the exception and run long.
• Germany and much of continental Europe. Photo still common in some markets, and a Lebenslauf follows its own conventions including signed and dated versions in traditional sectors.
• Australia and New Zealand. Closest to the UK, though longer CVs of three to four pages are more accepted.

Every package includes both a UK-format version and a Gulf-format version, because a large share of our clients apply to both and the documents genuinely differ.

Rates