* Correspondence
Michael Gottlieb, MD, Department of Emergency Medicine, Rush University Medical Center, 1750 West Harrison Street, Suite 108 Kellogg, Chicago, IL 60612, USA.
Email: moc.liamg@dmbeilttogleahcim
The curriculum vitae (CV) is nearly ubiquitous in academic medicine, often beginning prior to medical school and continually being refined throughout graduate and postgraduate training. The CV serves as a formal record of your experiences and accomplishments, which can help others to better understand what you have done thus far and your potential qualifications for a position or promotion. 1 An academic CV differs from a resume, in that the latter is much more condensed (typically 1–2 pages) and focuses more on specific skills and qualifications, rather than cataloguing your full academic history.
A well‐crafted CV is important throughout an academic career. A CV is not a static document and can be formatted to serve a variety of needs. One of the most common uses of a CV is to apply for a new job or leadership position. Most chairs and hiring committees will expect a CV and cover letter as the initial component of the application materials. Additionally, the CV is utilized as one of the primary criteria as part of the dossier used for making decisions about promotion and tenure (P&T). We wish to emphasize that the CV should not be the sole criterion for a position or advancement and that it is important to engage in holistic review of applications 2 ; however, the CV is one important component of this process. In addition to the above, a CV is important personally for considering and reevaluating your niche and career path. It can serve as a tool for you and your mentor to discuss your interests and current progress and identify areas for future growth. Finally, the CV serves as a record of your personal progress and achievements and can be invaluable in crafting your personal statement for academic advancement. It can also be a valuable tool to help boost morale and combat imposter syndrome. 3
Despite the important role that a CV plays in career and academic advancement, we have seen wide variations in the quality, format, and structure of CVs. Building upon a recent CV workshop at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Scientific Assembly, we sought to share our experience and insights to help guide resident and attending physicians when embarking on creating or refining their CV.
While the exact naming conventions and order may vary by institution, we will review the most common components of a CV and provide tangible recommendations for each component. In general, a CV should have a consistent and legible font, appropriate spacing and use of line breaks, bolding to highlight key components or headers, and the dates should be listed in a consistent order (either chronological or reverse chronological). A sample CV is included here as Appendix S1.
The first page should include your name and degrees at the top. We recommend that your name be written in a larger font and bolded. This allows your name to stand out and reduces the risk of your CV being accidentally confused with another person when there are multiple applicants. The top of the page should also include your contact information, such as your address, phone number, and email address. We generally recommend using your work address for privacy. However, if you are applying for a new job, you may want to consider using an email address that is more confidential, such as your personal email. A cell phone number, work number, or both could be included depending on your preferred contact number(s). Finally, the first page should include the date that the CV was last updated. This will assist you with tracking the versions, as well as the recipient if you send an updated CV later. All subsequent pages should include your italicized name at the top right as a header along with the page number on the bottom right as a footer. This can assist with ensuring that no pages are lost or reviewed out of order if the CV is printed.
The next section is your education. This begins in reverse chronological order with your postgraduate training (e.g., residency, fellowship), followed by graduate training (e.g., undergraduate institution, medical school, masters degree programs). When listing your undergraduate training, make sure to include the institution and dates attended, degree obtained, major(s), minor(s), and any honors (e.g., cum laude, distinctions, Alpha Omega Alpha). You should include any advanced leadership training that does not fall within the above categories (e.g., leadership courses, speaker courses) as a separate section located after the education section, which could be entitled “Additional Training” or “Faculty Development.”
The next component of the CV should contain appointments, such as academic appointments and nonacademic or hospital appointments. For faculty, you should include your current and prior academic appointments along with the dates at each rank. This will be particularly valuable for P&T committees. You should also include all relevant employment. This can include your current role as well as prior clinical roles. These should include the title, department, institution, and date range. As a general rule, you should limit these to jobs most relevant to the current position and should routinely trim these back as you advance your career. For example, being a scribe in the emergency department would be relevant for medical students and residents but would no longer be relevant for a full professor. Some prefer to maintain selected early accomplishments, but these are individual decisions that warrant deliberate consideration. For those with prior careers outside medicine, consider keeping them in, particularly if they are directly relevant to the current role. As an example, if you are applying for a chair position, a history of being the chief financial officer of a company would be relevant regardless of the timing.
You should generally list all honors and awards that you have received along with the corresponding date. If an award is not readily apparent by the name, consider adding a brief description or annotation. As you move forward in your career, you may consider removing less relevant awards and honors, similar to positions as discussed in the preceding paragraph.
Certifications and licensure are important to include along with the dates active. However, you should avoid including information such as your DEA or medical license number unless explicitly required to reduce the risk of this being misappropriated. Additionally, you should include the societies to which you belong. While society memberships could be listed later (given the reduced impact compared with other aspects of your CV), we believe it is valuable to list early because it allows you to abbreviate societies with long names if used later in the CV (e.g., leadership positions, committee roles, invited lectures). However, this may depend on your institution's format.
You should also include a dedicated section on your leadership positions at your institution and within professional societies as well as any committee or task force membership roles within professional societies. While traditionally these are listed in order based on the dates of involvement, you could consider grouping these by organization to demonstrate dedication to a specific group. This can be particularly valuable if you are applying for a leadership role in one of those societies as well as for helping support the citizenship components of your P&T application. For some institutions, this may alternatively be listed in a “service” or “administrative leadership” category.
The teaching section should include your involvement with leading any local, regional, and national curricula. While not as comprehensive as an educator's portfolio, 4 you should consider including sufficient information for the reader to understand the scope, size, and time commitment of the program. It is important to separate this curricular section (i.e., a set of courses) from the latter section on individual courses. You may also consider separating into undergraduate medical education (e.g., medical students), graduate medical education (e.g., residents, fellows), and other learners (e.g., paramedics, nursing). We recommend including the program title, your role, the number of learners, type of learners (specialty and experience level), frequency of the courses, length of the sessions, and dates that the program occurred. As you advance in your career, you may consider removing low‐impact internal teaching activities.
The mentorship section should include any people you are or have been mentoring. When deciding who to include, consider whether you could readily describe the skills, knowledge, insights, or value you have provided to the mentee. This section should include their name, length of mentorship, current role (e.g., faculty role, fellow, resident, medical student), and institution as well as their prior role when you began mentoring them (if applicable). As not all institutional CV formats have a designated location for this, you could consider making this a separate appendix file.
The scientific and scholarly activities section (also known as the research section) can include a wide array of components. We recommend including any research‐specific service roles (e.g., editor, reviewer for professional journals, reviewer for granting agencies) as well as scholarship (e.g., grant funding, abstract or poster presentations, peer‐reviewed manuscripts, books, blog posts), in accordance with your institution's preferred format. We recommend that all publications be numbered and listed in chronological or reverse chronological order, depending on your institution's preference. Publications should be listed in a citation format consistent with your institutional guidelines, and you should consider adding the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or PubMed identifier (PMID). When listing grant funding, you should include the funding source, amount, grant award name, date(s), and your role. You could also consider adding an annotation here to describe the importance of an item or your contribution to a grant or manuscript. For the research presentations, manuscripts, and book chapters, we recommend putting your name in bold and/or italics to help your name stand out. You could also consider adding your research metrics here (e.g., h‐index, i‐10) to help demonstrate your scholarly impact. 5 , 6
Lectures, podcasts, and nonresearch presentations could be listed within either teaching or scholarship and we advise following your institutional guidelines. 7 These should include the URL, link, or website and data on downloads if available. For individual lectures and didactic sessions, include the institution or professional group, date, location, number of attendees, contact hours (i.e., length of session), and topic. Consider separating this out into local lectures; grand rounds at outside institutions; and invited sessions at regional, national, or international conferences, with higher‐impact (i.e., international or invited) presentations listed first.
Additional categories may be added and may include your fluency in another language or additional expertise (e.g., SPSS, RevMan). It is advisable to be honest when listing these, because they may be challenged. For example, if foreign language proficiency is indicated as “fluent,” it is possible that a prospective employer may wish to conduct the interview in that language. Some people also list a few extracurricular passions (e.g., sports, literature) that may serve to foster a connection with a potential interviewer.
Finally, your last page should include your references. Depending on the position, you could either list your references or add a comment “references available on request.” The latter component may be useful when you are applying for an external position. When including references, identify three references who can speak to your qualifications for a given position. This may include your department chair, mentors, those in similar roles that you are applying for, and those who are a direct supervisor to you. In many cases, your references may not be from your institution. Make sure that your references know they have been listed as a reference. You should include their role and current address, phone, and email to guide the reader when reaching out to them.
In this section, we describe recommended strategies to manage your CV (Table 1 ). Even though institutions often require the same information, each may have a specific format for organizing and/or building your CV. Some institutions furnish a guideline that includes the desired headings and order of the entries on the CV, while others provide an electronic fillable template. By adhering to the desired format for your institution and advancement track (e.g., research, clinician‐educator, tenure), your P&T committee will be able to access all information easily to process academic advancement decisions. Since most formats include similar categories, you can send this version of your CV to prospective employers or other interested parties upon request. However, if you are seeking a new career or hope to delve into a niche within a particular academic realm, it may be useful to tailor your CV to highlight relevant aspects.
Best practices for creating and managing the CV for career advancement
Delete irrelevant categories.