Transforming Your CV to a Resume 2
Transforming Your CV to a Resume
Where do I start?
Ensure your CV has all the up-to-date academic
activities and accomplishments you have accumulated
since college. This will serve as your master CV.
You can develop industry or role-specic resumes by
taking relevant elements out of your master CV and
modifying them. This step-by-step guide help you
build and format a strategic and targeted resume
highlighting your relevant experiences and skills to a
specic career beyond academia.
How do I covert my CV to resume?
Always start with a job you are planning to apply to.
Thoroughly review the job description to identify which
transferable skills and experiences are considered
more important than others.
Once you have a list of core skills and experiences for
the position, consider and write down the relevant
knowledge and skills you’ve gained through your
training (e.g., research, teaching, fellowships). Don't
forget to consider your volunteering work (e.g.,
graduate student group engagement, mentoring
undergraduates, services to your department), and
any freelance work you may have involved within or
outside of academia.
Once you have compiled this information, ask
yourself how you achieved success in your work and
what specic tools you used to reach your goals.
These questions will help you develop impactful
accomplishment statements from your experiences.
This process will be covered in more detail throughout
this guide.
What do I include in my resume?
Skills: During your graduate career, you develop
valuable transferable skills that build upon research or
teaching. Examples include collaborating with peers
and identifying emerging trends/patterns from data
to offer evidence-informed insights for improvement.
These may also include specic equipment, software or
capabilities used within each experience such as SAS,
Python, R, and Illustrator.
Accomplishment Statements: These are
impactful descriptions conveying your skills and
accomplishments under each of your most relevant
experiences. Start with an action verb. You should
qualify and quantify your achievements in each of
your accomplishment statements. Highlight your most
relevant transferable skills in your accomplishment
statements in a way that a hiring manager can easily
understand.
Relevant Experience: This section includes full-time
or part-time employment, volunteering, extracurricular
activities, teaching, research and/or eld experiences.
Names and locations of employers and dates of
employment should be included. Create a bulleted list
of accomplishment statements detailing the level of
responsibility, knowledge and acquired skills relevant
to the position to which you are planning to apply
Headings: Create specic headings to break down
your experiences by functional area. Examples include:
Archival Research, Lab Management Experience,
Leadership Experience, Teaching Experience or
Technical Skills.
Step 1: Identify Key Transferable Skills
Graduate students develop transferrable and technical skills throughout their Princeton experience. Whether
it’s through teaching, research/eld work, campus engagement, some of the skills graduate students may
develop during their training may include:
• Data analysis and interpretation
• Abstract reasoning
• Research
• Project management
• Synthesis of ideas, data or existing literature
• Communication (verbal and written)
• Self-management, initiative and motivation
• Ability to express complex information
• Collaboration and leadership skills
• Critical thinking/problem solving
See the next page for some examples of more specic skills you may have developed during your academic career.