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What's the difference between a curriculum vitae and a resume?

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1. A resumé is a summary of an individual's career experience and education. When a resume is sent to prospective agents or publishers, it should contain the author's vital publishing credits, specialty credentials, and pertinent personal experience. While Curriculum Vitae is a special type of resume traditionally used within the academic community. Earned degrees, teaching and research experience, publications, presentations, and related activities are featured. Unlike a resume, a CV tends to be longer and more informational than promotional in tone. Note: The CV required in theses and dissertations follows a very specific format. The primary differences are the length, the content and the purpose. A resume is a one or two page summary of your skills, experience and education. A goal of resume writing is to be brief and concise since, at best, the resume reader will spend a minute or so reviewing your qualifications. A Curriculum Vitae, commonly referred to as CV, is a longer (two or more pages), more detailed synopsis. It includes a summary of your educational and academic backgrounds as well as teaching and research experience, publications, presentations, awards, honors, affiliations and other details. When to Use a CV In the United States a Curriculum Vitae is used primarily when applying for international, academic, education, scientific or research positions or when applying for fellowships or grants. As with a resume, you may need different versions of a CV for different type of positions. What to Include in Your CV Like a resume, your CV should include your name, contact information, education, skills and experience. In addition to the basics, a CV includes research and teaching experience, publications, grants and fellowships, professional associations and licenses, awards and other information relevant to the position you are applying for. Start by making a list of all your background information, then organize it into categories. Make sure you include dates on all the publications you include.
2. The short answer is: a curriculum vitae is a list of one's academic achievements, such as where you graduated from, the degree(s) earned, list of published works, etc. Whereas, a resume combines not only one's academic credentials, but your work experiences, job objective, personal references, personal interests and hobbies. In either case, the format/style of the curriculum vitae and that of a resume should consider the following issue. Besides setting all margins to 1", the most important criteria for setting up a professional resume besides relevant text, is "scanability." Here are some helpful tips: 1. Place just below your identification header [your hame, address, phone, email address] any Conditional Warning Statement such as "Confidential Resume,"Do Not Contact Current Employer," etc. 2. Always fill-in an Objectives category [just below the Conditional Warning Statement] and make sure that he Objective will contribute to the profitability of your future employer; 3. Select a mono-type font such as Helvetica, Arial, Courier or Times Roman; do not select any cursive handwriting styles which cannot scanned; 4. Keep font sizes within a range of 10 to 12 pts.; 5. Avoid styling text with a justified alignment, keep it flushed left; 6. Instead of using tabs to set up blocked text entries, generate a table and use the column and row settings accordingly; 7. Do not place an i.d. picture anywhere on the resume, this is a major taboo due to discrimination issues; 8. Do not place any graphic text [saved as .gifs] onto the resume since it may be overlooked during the scanning phase; 9. List at the very end of the resume your interests which should include travel experiences, language skills, social interactions such as golf, team sports, tennis, etc. In conclusion, the above helpful hints were designed to allow ease of scanning of your resume into PDF which can then be text captured for seach purposes by your potential employer. Failure to conform the resume to appropriate fonts and styles as outlined above will result in rejection of the resume simply due to the inability of the scanning device to properly index relevant resume entries. Good luck!