How to Describe Your Current Job on Your CV
The role you are in right now is the one a recruiter reads most carefully, and it is usually the one people write worst. Everything else on your CV is settled history. Your current job is still moving, which makes it harder to summarise, and the result is often a vague paragraph that could describe almost anybody.
Getting this section right is worth more than polishing anything else. It is the entry that answers the reader’s main question: what can this person do for us now?
Present Tense for Now, Past Tense for Done
The simplest rule is the one most people get muddled. Write your ongoing duties in the present tense, and write completed achievements in the past tense. The two sit together perfectly well in the same entry.
So you might write that you manage a team of six, because you still do, and then write that you cut onboarding time by three weeks, because that is finished and measurable. Mixing tenses within a single bullet is what looks careless, not using both across the section.
Every previous role goes entirely in the past tense. No exceptions, even if the work still influences the company.
Say What the Job Actually Is
Job titles travel badly. An Operations Coordinator at a forty person logistics firm and an Operations Coordinator at a bank do almost nothing alike. If your title is vague, internal, or inflated, the reader has no way of knowing what you really do.
Add a single line under the title that frames the role. Something like the scale of the budget you handle, the size of the team, the region you cover, or the type of customer you deal with. One sentence is enough, and it stops the reader guessing.
If your official title is genuinely unhelpful, you can add a plain English version in brackets after it. Keep the official title first, because it needs to match what a reference check or an application form will show, but there is nothing dishonest about clarifying it.
Give the Current Role More Space
Weighting matters. Your current job should carry more detail than anything below it, and roles from ten years ago may need only a line each. A CV that gives equal space to every job reads like a list rather than a career.
As a rough guide, five or six bullets for the current role, three or four for the previous one, and one or two for anything older than about a decade. That shape signals progression on its own, before the reader has taken in a single word.
If you have been in the same job for a long time and worry there is nothing new to say, break the entry into phases. Show what the role looked like when you started and what it looks like now. Growth inside one job is still growth, and it is often more convincing than someone who moved four times.
Handling Achievements That Are Not Finished
Live projects are awkward. You cannot claim a result that has not landed, but leaving them out wastes your most current work.
Write them as progress rather than outcome. You can honestly say you are midway through migrating a system, that you have delivered two of four phases, or that early figures show a particular trend. Give the scale and the stage, and let the reader judge.
What you must not do is quietly write a live project in the past tense to make it sound finished. It is the kind of thing that unravels in an interview when someone asks how it went.
Do Not Copy the Job Description
The temptation with a current role is to lift the wording from your own job description, because it is accurate and it is right there. The problem is that a job description describes the post, not the person. It tells the reader what anybody in that seat would be expected to do.
Your CV needs to show what you specifically brought to it. The difference is the gap between the duty and the result, and that gap is where you actually get hired. If you want to work through this properly, our guide on achievements versus responsibilities walks through how to convert one into the other.
What to Do About a Job You Are Leaving Badly
Sometimes you are applying because the current role has gone wrong. A restructure, a manager you cannot work with, a promise that never materialised.
None of that belongs on the CV. The document should read as though the job is going perfectly well, because the reason for leaving is an interview conversation, not a written one. Write the role at its best and save the context for a person who can hear your tone of voice.
When You Have Just Started
A job you have held for two months is difficult. You have not achieved much yet, and a nearly empty entry draws the eye for the wrong reason.
Focus on remit rather than results. State what you were brought in to do, what you are responsible for, and anything you have already put in place. It is completely acceptable for a very recent role to be shorter than the one below it, because the reader can see the dates and will not expect miracles.
If the new job is a poor fit and you are already looking, resist the urge to hide it. A short unexplained gap raises more questions than a short job does, and dates that do not add up are one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
Keep a Running Record
The reason this section is hard to write is almost always that you are trying to reconstruct two years of work from memory on a Sunday evening. Nobody remembers the numbers, so the entry ends up vague.
The fix is to stop reconstructing. Keep a plain file somewhere and add a line to it whenever something goes well: a project delivered, a figure that moved, a problem you solved that nobody else could. Two minutes a month, and the raw material is there with the detail intact when you next need it.
It also helps at appraisal time, and it is invaluable if you are ever made redundant at short notice and need a CV in a hurry.
Match It to Where You Are Going
One more consideration. The current role should be written for the job you want next, not the job you have.
That does not mean inventing anything. It means choosing which parts of a genuinely broad role to give space to. If you manage a team and also run a budget, and the roles you are targeting are financial, the budget work deserves the detail and the team management can be a line.
Read three adverts for your target job and check that the vocabulary they use appears somewhere in your current role entry. If a requirement they all list is something you do every day but never wrote down, that is the gap to close. Our guide on finding CV keywords in a job description covers how to pull those terms out properly.
A Final Check
Read the current role entry on its own, with the rest of the CV covered up. Ask whether someone who has never met you could describe your job accurately from it, and whether they could name one thing you have done well.
If the answer to either is no, the section is not finished yet. That single block of text is doing more work than the rest of the page combined, and it deserves the extra half hour.
