When I first started working at Stack Overflow, I wondered why the candidate’s work experience is referred to as a CV on Stack Overflow Careers. I honestly thought Stack Overflow might be a European company or maybe they were just being snobs. A resume is your work experience written up on a piece of paper – job sites, employers, recruiters, and everyone else, it seems, uses “resume”.
So, what gives with Stack Overflow Careers? Why CV and not resume? I learned pretty quickly that a CV encompasses your accomplishments in a more detailed format than a traditional resume. In fact, Curriculum Vitae roughly translates as “course of my life”. It’s true that CVs are used widely in academics and medical fields as a way to list accomplishments and credentials that go beyond a specific job role. A CV is updated anytime you have something meaningful to add – maybe it’s the sales from that software you designed or a new qualification or something else awesome that you did. Conversely, a resume is a document that you scrape together when you’re desperately looking for a new job. …