Free Academic CV Template

How an academic CV differs from a resume

A resume is a short pitch for one job. An academic CV is a record. It opens with education — degrees, thesis title, supervisor, institution and year — because in academia your training is your first credential. After that come the sections a hiring committee looks for:

• Publications — journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and preprints, in one consistent citation style.
• Research — current projects, methods and areas of interest.
• Teaching and supervision — courses, tutorials, labs and students supervised.
• Grants, fellowships and awards — with the funder and year.
• Conferences and talks — invited talks first, then papers and posters.

Length follows your career. A PhD applicant may fill two pages; an established researcher can run to many more. Nobody expects it to fit on one page, but every section should still be easy to find.

Who needs an academic CV, and who doesn't

Use one for PhD and research master's applications, postdoc and lecturer posts, faculty jobs, research fellowships and grant proposals. It also suits industry research labs that ask for your publication record.

Norms differ by country. In the UK, academic CVs often run two to four pages, sometimes with the full publication list as an appendix, and leave out a photo and personal details such as age. In India, applications to universities and institutes, including faculty posts at IITs, NITs and central universities, often expect every qualification from school onward with marks or CGPA, alongside publications and teaching. In the US, "CV" means this academic format, and a resume is the short version.

Don't send an academic CV to a company that asked for a resume. Cut it to one or two pages that lead with skills and results, with a few selected publications. Our CV template guide covers that everyday version.

Will an ATS read a long academic CV?

Many universities now take applications through online recruitment systems that pull the text out of your file, so readability matters in academia too. Length is not the problem; layout tricks are. Use conventional headings such as Education, Publications, Teaching and Grants, so both the software and a committee member can find each section.

Write publications as plain text in one citation style, not as a screenshot from a reference manager or a pasted table. Keep dates in the same format throughout, and spell out a conference or journal name if its abbreviation is obscure outside your field.

ResumeInk's Academic layout is a single column with education at the top and everything else in a logical reading order. Every design is checked to read cleanly in ATS text extraction — real, selectable text, nothing locked inside images — and the ATS score in the editor tells you how readable your CV is before you send it.

Make your academic CV with ResumeInk

Upload your current CV as a PDF, a Word file or a photo, or start from the sample. The AI rebuilds it in the Academic layout with education leading. Click any line to edit it, add sections for publications, teaching, grants or conferences, and reorder them so your strongest evidence comes first.

Three Academic designs suit most fields:

• Classic traditional Academic — black serif type; the most conservative choice for the humanities, law and the pure sciences.
• Ivory editorial Academic — a warm cream page with editorial type for the arts and social sciences. See the Ivory editorial template.
• Professional Academic — clean blue accents for engineering, computing and applied research.

Switch to any of the 260 designs in one tap and your words stay put, so making an industry version never means retyping. Fine-tune fonts and spacing to keep long lists readable, then export a clean PDF.