From PhD to industry: translating your research for people who have never sat a viva

How to turn an academic record into an industry CV: what to cut, how to reframe what stays, and why the translation is your job rather than the recruiter's.

The reader has changed; the document must too

An academic panel reads your CV against a person specification, slowly, with coffee. A recruiter reads it in under thirty seconds, often after software has filtered it first, and hires for problems their team has right now. Sending your academic CV into that pipeline fails almost every time. The record is fine. The document is written in the wrong language, and nobody downstream is paid to translate it. That work is yours.

Two pages, newest first, achievements not duties

Cut to two pages at most; one is better if you are early-career. Reverse-chronological, with a short profile at the top: three lines saying what you are and what you are for, in the vocabulary of the job advert. Then experience, where the unit of writing changes. Academia lists roles and responsibilities; industry wants achievements with numbers attached. "Delivered a three-year research project on time and under a £40,000 budget" is the same PhD you were about to describe as "conducted doctoral research". One of these survives the thirty-second read.

The translation table

Most academic experience has a direct industry equivalent, and the trick is to name the transferable act rather than the academic container. Your thesis is project delivery: scoping, planning, execution over multiple years, with a fixed deadline and an examined output. Teaching is communication and training: you explained hard material to non-experts, weekly, to groups of forty, and were evaluated on it. Grant applications are winning resources through competitive bids. Conference talks are public speaking to critical audiences. Supervision and marking are line-management adjacent. Peer review is quality assurance. Say the second thing, then let the academic detail support it.

Numbers, everywhere you can put them

Industry CVs run on quantification, and academia gives you more numbers than you think: participants recruited, datasets built and their size, budgets held, students taught, papers shipped against deadlines, citation counts if they flatter, software users, downloads. Where a bullet has no number, ask whether it earns its line. A page of quantified achievements reads like evidence. A page of duties reads like a job description, and recruiters already have one of those.

What to cut, and how it will feel

The publications list goes, hardest of all. Replace it with one line ("author of nine peer-reviewed papers; list available") unless you are applying to R&D roles where the list still matters. Conference presentations compress to a phrase. Teaching shrinks to its transferable core. Referees come off entirely; industry asks later. Cutting the things you bled for feels like erasure, so it helps to hold the purpose in view. The CV is an advert for an interview, and interviews are where the depth comes back.

Jargon is a tax on your reader

Every discipline word costs attention that a recruiter will not spend. "Ethnographic fieldwork" becomes qualitative research with hard-to-reach users. "Supervised undergraduate dissertations" becomes mentored eight junior researchers through year-long projects. Read the job advert, note the exact nouns it uses, and use the same nouns for the same things; the first filter is often software matching keywords, and it has no imagination at all. Then have a friend outside academia read the result and mark every phrase they stumble on. Each one is a fix.

The letter changes register too

An industry cover letter is short: three paragraphs, half a page. Why this company, what you bring to this role with your two best evidenced claims, and a confident close. Skip the intellectual autobiography. Nobody in the building wants the arc of your thesis; they want to know you can do the job advertised, starting soon.

Mind the tone of the leaving

Finally, the framing that costs candidates offers: do not present industry as an escape or a consolation. Interviewers hear the apology in "leaving academia" phrasing, and it reads as a risk. The stronger frame is a move toward something: faster cycles, shipped products, problems with users attached. You spent years becoming a specialist in finding things out. Plenty of employers need exactly that. The CV's whole job is to say so in their language, and once it does, the conversation you actually want can start.