A UK software CV is a short, dense document with one job: earning you a conversation. Recruiters and hiring managers here skim for evidence — what you built, in which language, and what happened as a result — and they expect a particular shape. Two pages, reverse-chronological, no photograph, no date of birth. Get that shape right and your projects carry the argument for you. Get it wrong and strong experience gets dismissed before anyone reaches your second job.

Start with the UK conventions

UK CVs are more conservative than their American cousins. Two pages is the norm; one page is fine if you are a graduate or changing career, and three only if you have a decade of genuinely relevant work. Use A4, a single column, and a clean 10–12pt font. Leave out the photograph, date of birth, marital status and nationality — they are not expected here and they eat space you need. A short line stating your right to work in the UK is sensible if there is any chance a reader would wonder.

Your contact block sits at the top: name, city, mobile number, email, and links to a portfolio or GitHub profile. A full postal address is unnecessary. Save as PDF unless the advert asks for a Word file, and name it so a human can find it again — Hanna-Okafor-CV.pdf, not cv-final-v3.pdf. Set your spell-checker to UK English before you start, not after.

Pick the right sections, in the right order

Most strong technical CVs in this market use the same skeleton:

• Contact details — two lines at the top. Plain text, not a table or a text box.
• Profile — three or four lines describing what you do and the kind of role you want. Optional, but useful if you are changing direction.
• Technical skills — grouped by area: languages, frameworks, databases, cloud, testing, tooling. Grouping shows judgement; a single alphabetical dump does not.
• Experience — reverse chronological. Include non-software jobs, especially early on, but keep them to a line or two once you have relevant work.
• Projects — personal, freelance or open-source work. Essential for graduates, bootcamp leavers and career changers.
• Education — degree, university, dates, and classification (First, 2:1, 2:2). A-levels or equivalent only if you are early in your career or they are directly relevant.
• Extras — certifications, talks, mentoring, conference attendance, community work.

Where education belongs

If your degree is your strongest asset, put it above experience. If you have two or more years of commercial development behind you, it belongs near the bottom — a hiring manager wants to know what you shipped last quarter, not what you studied in 2019.

Write bullets that prove something

This is where most CVs fall apart. "Responsible for the front end" and "worked on various projects" tell a reader nothing they could not guess. Use a simple pattern instead: strong verb, what you did, the technology, and the result.

Rebuilt the checkout retry logic in TypeScript, cutting failed transactions and removing a recurring support ticket.

Only quantify when the number is real — a percentage you invented will collapse in the interview. If you cannot measure the outcome, describe the effect in plain terms: reduced manual steps, made the release process repeatable, gave the team its first automated test suite. Two to four bullets per recent role is plenty; older roles can have one.

Say something about ownership, too. Did you design the schema, review other people's pull requests, run the deploy, carry the on-call pager? Those details separate a developer who was present from one who was trusted.

Make your projects do the heavy lifting

Personal projects are the most underused section on a junior CV. Most people list a name and a technology, which reads like a shopping receipt. Give each project three or four lines: the problem it solves, the stack, one technical decision you made and why, and where a reader can see it working. A deployed URL and a repository with a clear README count for a lot.

Two or three polished projects beat ten tutorial clones. A half-finished tool with tests, sensible commit history and honest notes on what you would change next says more about how you work than a to-do app with authentication bolted on. If you have contributed to someone else's codebase — even documentation or a small bug fix that was merged — say so and describe the change.

British spelling and terminology

Small slips here mark a CV as untailored or machine-generated. The common ones:

• CV, not résumé. Covering letter, not cover letter.
• -ise endings: organise, prioritise, optimise, recognise, specialise.
• centre, colour, behaviour, catalogue, modelling, cancelled.
• Licence (noun) versus license (verb); practice (noun) versus practise (verb).
• Program for software, programme for a scheme or schedule.
• mobile, postcode, holiday, holiday allowance — not cell, zip code, vacation.
• Maths, not Math. A-levels and GCSEs, not high school diplomas.
• Dates the UK way: 12 March 2025. Avoid 03/12/2025 entirely; it reads differently on each side of the Atlantic.

Consistency matters more than any single rule. Do not write "optimise" in one bullet and "optimize" in the next. If you are applying to a US-based company with a UK office, matching their spelling is a reasonable courtesy — but pick one style and hold it throughout the document.

Tailor it, then check the software can read it

Most UK employers run applications through an applicant tracking system before a person sees them. That means one column, standard headings such as Experience, Education and Skills, no tables, no text boxes, no icons, and nothing important in a header or footer. Check that the text in your PDF is selectable rather than a scan, and open it on a phone to see whether it still reads well at that size.

Mirror the advert's vocabulary honestly. If the listing says TypeScript, AWS and Terraform, and you have used them, those words should appear. Do not pad the skills section with technologies you could not discuss for ten minutes — plenty of interviewers scan for exactly those items and ask.

Send a covering letter unless the advert forbids it. One page, three or four paragraphs: name the role, say why this company in particular, offer one proof point, then finish with availability and, if useful, your right to work. Address it to a named person when the advert gives you one.

Before you send it

1. Read it aloud. Anything you would be embarrassed to say in an interview gets cut.
2. Check every claim is one you can defend for ten minutes, with examples.
3. Proofread manually as well as with a spell-checker — it will not catch "manger" for "manager".
4. Ask someone who hires developers to point at the weakest bullet, then rewrite it.
5. Confirm the filename, the file type and the version you actually attached.

A CV is a working document, not a finished one. Update it every few months while the details are fresh, keep a plain-text copy of your achievement bullets somewhere safe, and you will never again spend a weekend reconstructing what you did two jobs ago.

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