Gearing Up: Accelerating Your CV to Promotion and Tenure

The curriculum vitae (CV) is an important document for a faculty member and is one of the first documents reviewed by peers or evaluators when a faculty member is being considered for promotion. It catalogs the training history, accomplishments, awards, and productivity of a faculty member over time. Prior work has demonstrated how the CV should be organized and what content should be included. However, no contributions to the literature have discussed how reviewers and other academic leaders view CVs, how to structure CV entries to promote career advancement, and how CVs can become useful or limiting for faculty, regardless of whether a faculty member is actively going through the promotion process. We discuss how the CV can be seen by evaluators and concerns that can cause the CV to decelerate. We then make recommendations on how the CV can accelerate a faculty member toward academic career advancement and promotion.