CV vs Resume: The Difference, the Geography Trap, and Which to Send

A practical guide from the team behind PlainResume, the free resume builder.

This question has two honest answers, and most articles give only one. In the US and Canada, a CV and a resume are genuinely different documents with different jobs. In most of the rest of the world, "CV" is simply the local word for the thing Americans call a resume. Sort out which conversation you're in, and the rest is easy.

The US distinction: selection vs record

The deep difference is the verb: a resume argues, a CV records. Nothing is ever deleted from a CV — a professor's CV at mid-career runs ten pages and that's normal, even expected. A resume that did that would be unread.

The geography trap

In the UK, Ireland, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand, job postings say "send your CV" and mean a short, tailored document — a resume by another name (usually 1–2 pages, same rules, minor local conventions). The trap runs both directions:

• An American applying to a London company should not send a long academic-style document because the posting said "CV." Send the resume; call it a CV in the email.
• A European applying to a US company should not pad their CV toward American resume myths in reverse — the same 1–2 page tailored document works; just label it "resume."

The rule: match the employer, not the word. Companies want selection; academic institutions want the record. One regional note worth knowing: photos, birth dates, and marital status still appear on CVs in parts of continental Europe and Asia, but are firmly off the document for US, UK, Canadian, and Australian applications — bias-screening rules make them a liability, not a courtesy.

Who actually needs a real CV

You need the full academic CV for: faculty and postdoc applications, grad school, research positions in industry labs, medical residency and fellowship applications, and most grants. Its sections are conventional — education first (yes, even mid-career — the opposite of resume order), then publications, presentations, grants and awards, teaching, service. Completeness beats brevity; committees use it to verify, not to skim. (US federal job applications are their own third thing — longer and more detailed than a resume, structured by the posting's requirements on USAJOBS, and neither document above.)

Converting a CV into a resume

The hard direction — usually an academic moving to industry — is a compression problem: 10 pages of record into 1 page of argument. The moves:

Research becomes outcomes ("built a data pipeline processing 2M records" beats "conducted research on…"), teaching becomes leadership evidence ("designed and taught a 120-student course; 8 TAs"), and the dissertation becomes a project with results — written in industry vocabulary, with verbs and numbers, not field jargon. Keep the full CV alive in parallel; academia may ask for it again, and it's the source of truth you compress from.

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