A resume is a short (1-2 page) targeted summary of relevant experience; a CV (curriculum vitae) is a longer, comprehensive record of your full academic and professional history. Which you need depends on your country and your field — here is the breakdown.
A resume is a marketing document: short, targeted, and tailored to a specific role. It includes only the experience relevant to the job and is typically one or two pages. A CV is an exhaustive record: every role, publication, presentation, grant, and qualification, in full, and it grows over a career to many pages.
The resume's job is to get you an interview for a specific role. The CV's job is to document your complete professional and academic record. They are written differently because they do different jobs.
In the United States and Canada, "resume" is the standard term for a job application document, and "CV" is reserved for academic, research, and medical positions. In the UK, Ireland, and much of Europe, "CV" is the everyday term for what Americans call a resume — a short, targeted document — and the long academic version is called an "academic CV".
So "send us your CV" from a London employer means send a short, tailored resume; the same phrase from a US university hiring for a faculty role means send the full academic record. Read the context.
Academia, scientific research, and medicine use a CV regardless of country: a comprehensive document listing publications, conference talks, teaching, grants, and affiliations. Industry roles — engineering, product, marketing, sales, operations — use a resume almost everywhere.
If you are a PhD moving from academia into industry, the most important shift is to convert your CV into a one-page resume: lead with applied, industry-translatable work and condense the publication list to a single line ("5 papers, 3 first-author, at NeurIPS/ICML").
Building an industry resume from an academic CV? Start with a clean single-column template and the scorer will tell you what to cut — free.
