Written CV examples for five UK roles

A CV example is only worth reading if somebody wrote the CV. Most of what gets published under that heading is a layout with placeholder text in it, or a list of qualities you ought to be demonstrating. The five pages here print the wording: a profile paragraph and four or five experience bullets, with real volumes in them, for a job that has been described properly first. They are not for copying, because the figures in them are not yours. They are there so you can see how much weight one specific number carries, then go and find the same number in your own last two years.

Every page names what that job is judged on, prints the extract, then reads it back line by line.

• Admin assistant. A primary school office: 420 pupil records, the central diary for a leadership team of four, and one checkable incident during a system migration.
• Customer service adviser. A regional insurer, around 45 calls a day alongside live chat, and complaints taken at the first stage of a written procedure.
• Sales executive. A £400,000 quota with the average deal size and the cycle length sitting next to it, because an unsized number is not evidence.
• Retail manager. Shrinkage held at 0.9% against a 1.2% target, 900 contracted hours scheduled a week, and a Christmas peak staffed with 14 seasonal starters.
• Hospitality manager. An independent 60-cover restaurant: covers a week, food gross profit at 68%, wages at 29%, and the rota underneath.

Every figure belongs to a written candidate, and no employer in them is real.

There is no page for your exact job title and you do not need one. What transfers between two CVs is the shape of the evidence, not the noun on the top line. If you keep records, run a diary and chase the things that have gone wrong, the admin assistant CV example is your page whether your title says administrator, coordinator or office junior.

If you run people and a budget inside a building that customers walk into, read the retail manager and hospitality manager pages together. One is sized by shrinkage and rostered hours, the other by covers and gross profit, and between them they show most of what an operations reader checks for.

Then run your own CV through the CV review against the advert you are applying to, and see how many of its essential criteria you already evidence.

Reading a good bullet and writing one are different jobs, and what usually sits between them is a number you have not looked up yet. The stock report, the rota, the till summary or your last appraisal will have it. Go and get those first.

Once your own figures are written down, Career Auntie can do the rewriting. Give it the CV you have plus one advert and it returns a tailored version of about two pages, editable in place and downloadable as PDF or Word. The prompt cannot introduce a figure that was not in what you gave it, so a vague CV in still gets you a vague CV out. A tailored CV costs 1.45 credits.