If you’ve been in academia for any length of time, you’ve got a CV. Conference presentations, publications, teaching assignments, every school you’ve ever attended — if it’s happened since you graduated from college, I’m going to bet it’s in there somewhere.
CVs are about nouns — they’re about the slow accumulation of proven expertise and experience, and the overall length of the CV tells the reader something. The purpose of a CV, after all, is to demonstrate to other people within your academic discipline how well you fit into the professional fold.
But resumes are not about nouns. Resumes are about verbs.
Resumes are about verbs because you rarely write resumes for people who share your background, your professional assumptions, or your aspirations. Resumes are about verbs because they’re intended to persuade the reader that you have skills that are relevant to the job at hand.
In other words, a resume is less an accumulation of everything you’ve produced and more a conglomeration of everything you’ve made happen.
Maybe you once organized a conference. In a CV, that’s demonstrating service and a commitment to the field. In a resume, that same experience could demonstrate your ability to plan events, to multitask, to communicate between different constituencies, or to lead. Same experience, but very different arguments.
At the end of the day, your resume, which may be different for different positions, should make a case for how well your skills and experience meet the needs of the job you’re applying for. It’s going to be much shorter than your CV, and it’s going to leave out much of what’s on your CV. But it should frame and highlight all of the experience that makes you a perfect fit for this new position.
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