What is a CV?

CV stands for curriculum vitae, Latin for “course of life.” What it means in practice depends heavily on which side of the Atlantic you are on.

Two different meanings

In the United Kingdom, Ireland, most of the European Union, and much of Asia and Africa, “CV” is simply the everyday word for what Americans call a resume: a one- to two-page summary of work experience used to apply for most jobs. If a UK job listing asks for a CV, it wants roughly the same document a US listing means by “resume.”

In the United States and Canada, “CV” means something narrower and longer. It refers specifically to the comprehensive academic and research document used for university faculty positions, postdoctoral applications, grants, and fellowships. That document lists everything: publications, conference presentations, grants received, courses taught, peer review activity, and professional memberships, with no length limit. A tenured professor’s CV can run to fifteen pages or more, because in that context, completeness is the point rather than a flaw.

Why the confusion causes real problems

Someone applying for an academic post in the US, having previously worked in the UK, might submit a one-page document labeled “CV” out of habit, when the hiring committee expects the full academic version. The reverse mistake also happens: sending a fifteen-page academic-style document to a UK company that just wanted a normal two-page summary.

The safest approach is to read what the specific employer or institution is actually asking for, rather than assuming from the word alone. If it is a corporate job outside academia, a concise, achievement-focused document is almost always correct regardless of which of the two words appears in the listing. If it is a university faculty search, expect and provide the long, comprehensive version.

What the two formats have in common

Despite the different lengths, both start from the same basic building blocks: contact details, a chronological history (of jobs or of academic milestones), and a section describing skills or expertise. The academic CV simply keeps expanding categories that the corporate version compresses or drops entirely, like publications and grants.

For the difference between a CV in the everyday UK sense and a US resume specifically, see CV vs. resume: what’s the difference.

Building the shorter version from your GitHub history

If what you need is the everyday, one- or two-page kind of CV rather than the academic one, resumefromgit.com generates it directly from a public GitHub profile: a visual summary of your languages, repositories, and contribution history, plus a downloadable PDF that formats cleanly for applicant tracking systems. It works from a username with no signup required, and it is built for developers applying to companies, not for the academic CV format described above.