We don’t have resumes here in the UK, just CVs. Whether you’re applying for a job as part time bar stuff, retail manager or academic, you pull together an appropriate CV, which should only stretch to 2 sides of A4 maximum. Which explains why, when we were thinking about a warm up activity for #DigiWriMo we ended up calling it an “AltCV“.
But apparently some people do make a distinction, and write about a resume being short and snappy while a CV is “a fairly detailed overview of your life’s accomplishments“.
It’s funny how a common language can lead to such confusion sometimes – we think we are talking about the same thing, but we are not really. AltCV seemed snappier than AltResume, that’s all.
The confusion surprised me to be honest. I’ve worked for around 20 years with people from so many different nationalities who almost always used CV. And when they wanted it to be short they asked for a short CV :). What I think may have happened there is that because of the cultural diversity that was present the word CV lost it’s original meaning and became a short name for whatever you use to provide information about your experience and background to recruiters or prospective employers, and it could be short of long. 🙂 Now I know I have to be careful next time I use the word.