Curriculum Vitae Templates and Tips to Help You

Preparing a CV is much easier when you use our curriculum vitae templates and follow our CV tips.

If you're looking for point and click curriculum vitae templates, you've come to the right place. Right now, we're still building our collection, so please stop back and visit often to see what we’ve added.

On this page, we have downloadable CV templates (MS Word) that you can customize in a matter of minutes, if you've already gathered all the information you need. But let's talk for a minute about curriculum vitae and why you might use one instead of a resume.

Curriculum Vitae versus Resumes

Both resumes and CVs are designed to market you to a new employer by showcasing your skills and accomplishments. The difference is in the detail and the length. Resumes are more of a summary, while CVs provide a lot more detail, especially about your education, research, teaching experience, and publishing history. So, they are also longer. Curriculum vitae literally means "course of life," and they are designed to tell much more about your professional life than a resume does.

CVs are used more commonly than resumes outside the US. But even within the US, the CV is the format of choice for those in the fields of higher education or research in medicine and science above the masters level. Resumes are more appropriate for business and nonprofit job seekers.

Outside the US, a CV may also contain personal data, such as hobbies and interests, that would be considered inappropriate on a resume.

CV Tips

Although CVs are much longer than resumes and are supposed to have more detail, this is not a license to write your life story, with irrelevant or uninteresting information. You must still follow these simple "C" rules:

• Be Clear. Keep your CV well organized and logical.
• Be Concise. Include only relevant and necessary information.
• Be Complete. Do include ALL the relevant information.
• Be Consistent. Use the same styles and fonts throughout the CV.
• Be Current. Keep your CV up-to-date, once you have it written, adding new publications and awards as they occur.

If you use curriculum vitae templates, you won't have any trouble with any of these areas.

Our Curriculum Vitae Templates Collection

The curriculum vitae templates below are in MS Word template format for the PC, so you have to have a PC and MS Word to use them. (Sorry about that, MAC users!) To download, just right click and choose "Save Target As." Make sure you choose a folder on your hard drive to store it in that you'll remember. Basic Curriculum Vitae Templates (DOT)