There is a particular kind of panic that grips academics when they realize they need a “resume.”

Suddenly, your CV, that 32-page monument to your intellectual suffering – the scrupulously delineated publications, conference papers, invited talks, dissertation, teaching experience, grants, fellowships, committee work, journal editing, and carefully alphabetized service contributions ” — becomes unusable.

You stare at the document as though someone has asked you to compress Middlemarch into a tweet.

Don’t despair, this is not the task at hand. Your academic CV and your professional resume are not different versions of the same document; they are entirely different documents. More than that, they are different GENRES of document.

One is a comprehensive archival record of scholarly legitimacy. The other is a strategic marketing document designed to secure an interview.

The Academic CV is an exhaustive record of intellectual production designed to establish your standing within a disciplinary hierarchy. Its function is evidentiary.

It demonstrates:

• scholarly productivity
• institutional affiliation
• peer validation
• disciplinary service
• teaching history
• funding success
• prestige signals

It is not meant to be concise, in fact, brevity can actively harm you in academic hiring. Search committees are evaluating the density of your scholarly output and your trajectory toward tenure, promotion, or institutional prestige.

This is why academics obsess over: publication order, invited versus contributed talks, grant amounts, journal rankings, dissertation committees, fellowships and conference participation. These details matter because academia is a credential economy. The CV exists to document your participation in that economy.

If you submit your CV for a nonacademic job, you look unhireable. The hiring manager (or, you know, the algorithm) will say, “this person is a professor. They don’t belong here,” and toss it right aside. And, if you have any doubts or qualms or judgments about this, just do the exercise (it’s a little applied anthropology really!) and think what would happen if you submitted a one to two page resume for an academic position! Can you imagine?? They’d take one look at it and say, “this person is not one of us,” and toss it. And they would have to,  not because they are jerks, but because that two page resume would not disclose any of the actionable achievements and experience that the committee requires to properly underestand your record.

These are two different ecosystems with entirely different rules and systems.

So, let’s look at the resume.

A resume is not a “short CV.” Industry employers are not evaluating your intellectual lineage but seeking to know, quickly, whether you can solve problems quickly, communicate effectively, and generate value.

Nobody outside academia cares that your dissertation used a Foucauldian framework to interrogate liminality in postcolonial maritime narratives. What they care about is:

• Did you manage projects?
• Analyze data?
• Lead teams?
• Write clearly?
• Meet deadlines?
• Build systems?
• Present findings?
• Handle stakeholders?
• Improve outcomes?

And guess what? YOU DID!!!! You did ALL these things on your path to gaining that PhD and building your career in academia! You just didn’t use these terms.

A resume translates your experience into the language of result.

Let’s go through the three worst mistakes academics make on their resumes.

1. Listing Duties Instead of Outcomes

Academics love task descriptions.

“Taught undergraduate composition.”

No. Instead, describe what happened because you taught; expressed differently, what did your teaching DO:

• Designed and delivered writing curriculum for 120+ students annually
• Improved student retention through scaffolded assessment strategies
• Led cross-functional collaboration with faculty and student support staff

Industry hiring managers think in terms of impact, scale, and measurable contribution, so you have to learn to speak that language.

2. Keeping Everything

Academics are trained never to omit accomplishments. You know this if you’ve read my CV advice!

But industry resumes require ruthless subtraction. It is not a memoir, it’s a selective argument about fit.

Nobody needs every conference paper, every guest lecture, every committee assignment, every course taught since 2011.

If it does not support the target role, cut it.

And remember you’re cutting nearly everything ANYHOW because it has to get to two pages.

But setting aside the length issue, this larger task is emotionally difficult for academics because academia rewards accumulation whereas industry rewards relevance. 

3. Refusing to Translate Academic Experience

Many academics cling to institutional jargon because it feels familiar and/or they’ve spent so long in academia that they don’t even recognize it as jargon any longer.

1) “Served on departmental curriculum committee.”

Translated:

• Managed collaborative policy review and implementation initiatives

2) “Conducted archival research.”

Translated:

• Synthesized large-scale qualitative datasets to produce actionable insights

3) “Adjunct instructor.”

Translated:

• Managed high-volume instructional delivery under compressed timelines and limited resources

As I’ve said repeatedly in these posts, yes you do have to make corporate style jargon your own. Is it easy or natural? No. But it’s doable. And it’s worthwhile. Think of it like learning a new language.

Shorthand: If your CV and resume contain the same bullet points in the same order with the same language, then your resume is failing.

To repeat my theme:  Your CV says “Here is everything I have done.” Your resume says “Here is why I am the solution to your specific problem.”

This does require constant customization. Alas, there is no shortcut. Resumes are always targeted, not generic.

So, this week, create and maintain two completely separate master documents.

Your Academic CV Master File

Include:

• all publications
• grants
• conferences
• teaching
• service
• awards
• affiliations
• mentoring
• media appearances
• certifications

This document is comprehensive and archival.

Your Resume Master File

Build a separate document organized around:

• transferable skills
• measurable outcomes
• leadership
• project management
• communication
• analysis
• operational impact

Then create targeted versions for specific job categories.

Academics often believe the problem is that “industry doesn’t understand academia.” and sometimes that is true, but far more often, academics don’t do the work of making academia understandable. I do genuinely believe that if all of us (and i include myself) had done better at this, higher ed would not be as vulnerable to the current levels of vitriol and contempt. We’d have a larger swath of the American populace who would have been taught how to see the value in what we do.

But that’s another conversation for another time. For now, your CV is written for scholars trained to decode scholarly prestige signals; your resume is written for employers making rapid decisions under time pressure. One rewards comprehensiveness and the other rewards clarity. One document cannot of the work of both.