The CV & Resume

Start with the hardest constraint and make peace with it: for a student or early-career designer, a CV should be one page. Not one and a half, not two - one. Senior people with a long record of built work and publications can justify two, and academic or research applications sometimes use a longer curriculum vitae in the strict sense, but for the job most readers of this course are chasing, one page is the standard and the discipline. The single page is not an arbitrary rule; it is a forcing function. It makes you cut, prioritise and phrase tightly, and the result is a document a reader can absorb in one glance instead of hunting through.

Be clear about what a CV is for, because it is not the portfolio's job and it is not your life story. A CV exists to let a reader confirm, fast, that you clear the bar and fit the role: the facts of who you are, what you can do, where you have done it, and how to reach you. It works alongside the portfolio (which shows the work) and the cover letter (which argues the fit), and it should not try to do their jobs. Your CV does not need to explain your design philosophy or narrate a project - it needs to be scannable, accurate and relevant.

That means the same ruthless curation you learned for the portfolio applies here. A reader does not need every part-time job, every workshop, every skill you have dabbled in. They need the relevant, strongest, most recent evidence, arranged so the important things are found first. A part-time café job from four years ago is archive; the studio internship where you drew details that got built is argument. When you are tempted to keep something because you are proud of it or it took effort, ask the portfolio question again: what is this doing for this reader's decision? If the honest answer is 'showing I am busy', it can go.

One more thing the single page protects you from: padding. A short, dense, confident CV reads as someone who knows what matters. A CV stretched to fill space with soft phrases - 'excellent communication skills', 'passionate about design' - reads as someone with less to say. Say less, but make all of it count.

A good CV has a shape a reader recognises instantly, so their eye knows where to go. The most reliable layout for a designer is a single column of story beside a slim sidebar of facts - or, just as well, clean stacked sections with generous headings. Whatever the arrangement, the running order from the top should be roughly: name and role, a short profile, experience, education, and skills - with contact details and software living in the header or sidebar where they are easy to find.

Work through it top to bottom. Name and current role go at the top, set larger than everything else - this is the one place a little size is warranted, because the reader should never have to search for whose CV this is. Contact is a single phone, a single professional email, your city, and - crucially for a designer - one link to your online portfolio or website. Make that link impossible to miss; it is the bridge from the CV to the work. A short two-line profile (optional, but useful) states who you are and what you are looking for in plain words: 'Part II architectural assistant with two years in residential and adaptive-reuse work, looking for a design-led studio in Bengaluru.' No adjectives, just position.

Experience is the heart of the CV, listed newest first. Each entry carries role, studio, place and dates, then two to four bullets - and those bullets are where the real work happens (the next section is entirely about them). Education follows the same reverse-chronological logic: degree, institution, dates, and only the details that matter (a relevant thesis title, a notable result, an award). You do not need to list every subject. Skills - software especially - belong in a compact, honest block: the tools you can actually use, grouped so the reader spots the ones they need. Resist listing twenty programs at 'intermediate'; name the five or six you genuinely work in.

The figure shows this skeleton. Notice how little is on it, and how fast you can find any single fact. That legibility - clear headings, consistent alignment, real white space, type large enough to read - is not decoration. On a designer's CV, the layout is itself a small proof that you can organise information and finish a document to a standard. A cramped, misaligned, inconsistent CV undercuts every claim of design ability on the page.

Most CVs are killed by their bullets. The weak ones list duties - the things the job involved - in flat, passive, interchangeable language that could describe anyone. The strong ones report what you did and what came of it, in your own active verbs, with enough specifics that a reader learns something real about you. The simple, reliable formula is action verb + what you did + the result or scale.

Compare a duty with an achievement:

Weak:   Responsible for producing drawings for residential projects.
Strong: Produced GA and detail drawings for 3 residential projects (2 now built), coordinating early with the MEP consultant to cut site queries.

The weak line is a job description; the strong line is evidence. It opens with a verb you own ('produced'), states what and how much ('GA and detail drawings for 3 residential projects'), and adds an outcome ('2 now built', 'cut site queries'). The reader finishes it knowing you can document a building and work with consultants - which is exactly what they are trying to find out.

A few more, across situations:

- Led the concept-stage massing studies for a 40-unit housing scheme, presented to the client and carried into the winning submission.
- Built the physical presentation model for the studio's competition entry, which was shortlisted (top 6 of 120).
- Rebuilt the practice's Revit title-block and sheet template, saving roughly a day of setup on every new project.
- Ran the site survey and as-built drawings for a heritage bungalow, feeding directly into the adaptive-reuse proposal.

Notice what makes them work: strong verbs (led, built, rebuilt, ran), a concrete object, and wherever possible a number or an outcome. Numbers are your friend - units, square metres, team size, a shortlist position, a percentage of time saved. They make claims specific and believable. When you genuinely cannot quantify (much student work resists it), still lead with a real verb and a real result: 'developed', 'tested', 'resolved', 'presented'. Avoid the dead openers - 'responsible for', 'assisted with', 'involved in', 'duties included' - and avoid empty self-praise ('excellent team player'); let the achievement imply the quality. Three sharp bullets beat six soft ones. Write them, then cut the weakest until only the earners remain.

Here is a reality that surprises many designers: at larger firms and on job portals, your CV may be read first by software, not a person. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) parses your CV into fields and lets a recruiter search and filter applicants - often by keyword. If your CV is a beautiful, image-heavy, multi-column InDesign spread with text baked into graphics, the parser may read it as garbled nonsense and you never reach the human. This does not mean your CV must be ugly. It means, when you are applying through a portal or to a big practice, you should also have a clean, text-based version the machine can read: real selectable text (not text-as-image), standard section headings the parser recognises ('Experience', 'Education', 'Skills'), a simple layout, and a sensible file name.

Keywords matter here, but honestly. Read the job posting and make sure the genuine skills and tools they name - 'Revit', 'construction documentation', 'AutoCAD', 'Part II', a specific building type - appear on your CV in your real experience where they are true. This is not gaming the system; it is describing yourself in the words your reader (human or machine) is searching for. What you must never do is stuff keywords you cannot back up. A recruiter's filter might pass you, but the interview will not, and a claimed skill you fumble in person costs you far more than the honest gap would have.

A short, practical checklist for the realities:

- Send a PDF for humans; keep a clean text-readable version for portals/ATS.
- Name the file properly: Asha-Menon-CV.pdf (never CV-final-v3.pdf).
- Use real text, not text baked into images, for anything a parser must read.
- Mirror the posting's genuine keywords where they are true of you.
- Keep dates, spelling and tenses consistent - errors here read as carelessness.
- One page, sensible margins, type no smaller than about 10pt.

Above all, keep two audiences in mind at once. The machine wants clean, parseable, keyword-honest text; the human wants a clear, well-set, confident page that respects their time. These are not in conflict - a well-structured CV serves both. Do not let fear of the algorithm turn your CV into robotic filler, and do not let a love of layout make it unreadable to the software. Aim, as always, for the clean, curated argument: the few true facts that make a busy reader want to open your portfolio and pick up the phone.