How to Update an Old CV

Opening a CV you last touched in 2016 is a strange experience. Some of it still holds up. Most of it belongs to a different job market, and a few things on it will actively work against you now.

Updating it properly is not a matter of adding your latest job to the top. It is a rebuild, and the good news is that the raw material is already there.

Start by Deciding What the CV Is For

The version you saved years ago was aimed at a specific job. If you are aiming somewhere different now, the whole emphasis needs to shift, and no amount of tidying will fix a document pointed at the wrong target.

Write down the job title you want and find three real adverts for it. Those adverts tell you what the market currently asks for, which words it uses, and what it treats as essential. Everything you keep or cut should be judged against them.

This step takes twenty minutes and it saves you from politely updating a CV that was never going to work.

Cut the Things That Date It

Several conventions that were normal a decade ago now stand out immediately.

• Date of birth, marital status and nationality. All unnecessary in the UK.
• A full postal address. Town and county is enough.
• “References available on request”. Assumed, and it wastes a line.
• The heading “Curriculum Vitae” at the top.
• A landline number.
• An email address from a provider that no longer suggests you are current.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. Together they tell the reader the document has not been looked at in a long time, which is not the impression you want from the top third of page one.

Compress the Distant Past

The most common problem with an old CV is that it gives 2009 the same amount of space as last year. That is a hangover from when each job was written as it happened and never revisited.

Work backwards. Your current or most recent role should be the biggest entry. The one before it slightly smaller. Anything more than ten or twelve years old usually needs a single line, and anything more than about fifteen years old can go into a short summary section listing titles, employers and dates only.

This does two things. It puts the weight where the reader is looking, and it stops your CV running to four pages. If you are unsure how long the finished document should be, our guide on how long a CV should be sets out the sensible limits.

Rewrite Duties Into Results

CVs written years ago tend to be lists of responsibilities, because that is how everybody wrote them. The market now expects outcomes.

Take each role you are keeping and ask what changed because you were there. Numbers are ideal, but a clear before and after works even without them. You saved time, you fixed something that kept breaking, you grew a service, you trained the people who came after you.

You will find you remember more than you expect once you start. Old appraisals, saved emails and handover documents are all useful memory prompts if you still have them.

Modernise the Language

Some phrasing has quietly aged. Terms like “hard working team player”, “excellent communication skills” and “dynamic self-starter” were tired ten years ago and are invisible now, because every second CV contains them.

Replace claims with evidence. Instead of saying you communicate well, show the audience you communicated with and what it achieved. Instead of calling yourself organised, name the thing you organised and how big it was.

Check the technical vocabulary too. Systems get renamed, qualifications get restructured, and job titles drift. Using the old name for something signals that you have not kept up, even when you have.

Refresh the Format

Layout conventions have moved as well. Dense blocks of justified text, elaborate borders, tables with visible gridlines and clip art icons all look dated and several of them cause problems for automated screening.

Aim for clean headings, generous white space, consistent alignment and a single readable font. Reverse chronological order, with the most recent role first, remains the standard for good reason.

If your old CV used a two column layout with a sidebar, be careful. Those templates look smart and are frequently misread by parsing software, which scrambles the order of your career. Our guide on writing an ATS-friendly CV covers what survives automated screening.

Fill in What Happened Since

If there is a gap between the last entry and today, deal with it plainly. Time out for family, health, study, caring, travel or a redundancy that took a while to recover from are all ordinary, and a short factual line closes the subject.

Also add anything you have done that is not employment. Volunteering, courses, freelance pieces, committee roles and formal training all count, and people returning after a break routinely undersell them.

Read It as a Stranger

When you have finished, leave it a day and then read it cold, as though someone else wrote it.

Ask whether it is obvious what you do now, whether the strongest thing about you appears in the first half of page one, and whether anything on it would make a reader think the document is old. If all three come back clean, the CV has caught up with you.