If someone reads your engineering CV, can they tell what you are actually known for professionally? What you have worked on, what you can do, and why that matters to the role in front of them?
That is what I want to understand. A list of job titles and a paragraph saying you are hard-working won’t do all that work for you. Make the connection clear.
I’m Mark Hopkins, engineer at heart and recruiter by trade. I’ve worked in recruitment since 2005 and founded Thomas Lee Recruitment in 2016. Here is what I look for in an engineering CV, and where I think people make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves.
1. Make it easy to find the important information
Start with a clear layout: contact details, a short professional summary, relevant skills, employment history and qualifications. Use recognisable headings and put your most recent work first. If you are starting out, your apprenticeship, qualifications and project work may deserve more space near the top.
There is no magic page count that makes a CV good. Keep it as concise as the relevant evidence allows. Give recent, relevant roles proper detail and compress older or less relevant work. Don’t remove useful engineering experience just to meet an arbitrary two-page rule, and don’t keep repetition simply because you have room.
2. Tell me what you do in the opening summary
Explain your engineering specialism, the products or processes you know, and the work you want to move towards. The opening should help someone place your experience, rather than make them dig through the whole document to work it out.
Use the language of the vacancy where it accurately describes your skills. If the role calls for design, maintenance, projects or controls experience, show where yours fits. Don’t claim knowledge you haven’t got just because the words appear in the advert.
3. Explain the work, your contribution and the result
For each relevant role, give the company, job title and dates, then explain what you were responsible for. An internal title may make perfect sense to your employer and mean very little to anyone outside it. Keep the official title and add a plain-English explanation of the function if needed.
Then show what you contributed. What did you design, improve, maintain, deliver or solve? What was your part in it? What changed as a result? A team achievement is useful, but be clear about your own involvement.
Use figures when they are accurate, supportable and appropriate to share. If you cannot substantiate a percentage or saving, don’t manufacture one. Scope, complexity, responsibility and the outcome can still explain the value of the work. Avoid disclosing confidential employer or customer information.
4. Be specific about technical skills and tools
Make relevant engineering knowledge easy to find: processes, equipment, software and technical methods you have actually used. Relevant skills might include FEA, CFD, Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, PLC programming, SolidWorks, CATIA, AutoCAD, MATLAB or SAP. You don’t need every item. You need the ones that describe your work.
Give some context where it matters. Being familiar with a package is different from using it daily or taking responsibility for the work produced with it. Tell the reader what level of experience they are looking at.
5. Include the qualifications that matter to the role
List relevant apprenticeships, vocational qualifications, degrees and training accurately. Don’t make the reader guess how your engineering background was built. Early-career candidates may need more educational detail; experienced candidates can give more space to relevant work.
Keep professional registration and professional-body membership separate. Chartered Engineer (CEng), Incorporated Engineer (IEng) and Engineering Technician (EngTech) are registration titles. Membership of an institution such as the IMechE, IET or ICE is a different detail. State the status you actually hold.
6. Follow the application’s file instructions
An applicant tracking system may extract information from your CV into application fields. That is not the same thing as an automatic decision to reject you, and there is no universal rule that a PDF will be rejected.
Follow the employer’s instructions on file type. Greenhouse, for example, accepts both Word documents and PDFs. Use selectable text, clear headings and straightforward formatting, then check any details the application form fills in for you. Complicated layouts and image-only files can cause parsing problems. None of this is a reason to stuff the CV with keywords that don’t reflect your experience.
7. Give useful context for career breaks
If there is a break in your employment history, a short factual explanation can help the reader understand the timeline. Don’t invent freelance work, study or projects to fill a space. Include them if you actually did them and they are relevant.
You don’t need to turn a career break into a confession or provide private personal detail. Keep the explanation proportionate and bring the focus back to the experience and skills you can offer now.
8. Check the basics before you send it
Check your phone number, email address, employment dates and any professional-profile links. Make sure the CV attached to a job-board account is the version you intend to send. A polished document on your laptop doesn’t help if the application sends an older one.
Read the advert again. Can someone see the relevant evidence without having to guess? Your CV should explain what you have done and what that equips you to do next. It can start a useful conversation; it cannot guarantee an interview or a job.
Put it into practice
My existing CV document with notes is available here. For the wider job-search toolkit, the Candidate Resource Pack brings together a CV template, job tracker and guides to applications, interviews, offers and resigning.
Once the CV is ready, use the job-hunting masterclass to plan what you do with it. When an interview arrives, start preparing your own evidence for three common interview questions.