With a page full of strong bullets, it’s time to put them into a CV! The natural move is to grab a template and fill it in from top to bottom, the way CVs have always looked. Here’s how that turns out for a chemistry teacher moving into data analysis:
- Education: a chemistry degree from 2012
- Experience: eight years of teaching, with nine bullets
- Courses: the data analytics bootcamp
- Projects: the air-quality analysis, right at the end
Now run the skim test from earlier in this section. A recruiter hiring a junior data analyst looks at the top third and sees a chemistry degree and a teaching job. Whoops! The most relevant evidence—the bootcamp projects and the data work from the teaching job—sits beyond the reach of a quick first pass.
Order by Strength, Not Habit
It’s easy to assume a CV has one correct order, but it doesn’t. The usual sections, such as a header with links, an optional summary, skills, experience, projects, and education, are building blocks. You arrange them so that the strongest evidence for your target sits where a reader looks first.
For that career changer, this might mean a short summary, then Projects, then a trimmed Experience section whose bullets lead with the data work, like the grade tracker and the presentation of trends to the school governors. Education and the bootcamp come after that. Reverse chronological order still applies within Experience, but the sections themselves can move.
A systems administrator with twelve years of experience and an Ansible migration to show for it takes a different approach. Experience comes first, with the automation work near the top. The rule is the same for both. After reading only the top third, a reader should know your target role, your most relevant evidence, and your key tools.
