Academic CV for faculty jobs: lecturer and assistant professor applications

First step: treat the job advert as the marking scheme

Imperial College London's early career researcher institute describes every lectureship as a mix of teaching, research and administration, with proportions that vary by university and department. Its advice is to tailor the CV to each individual application rather than keep one generic lectureship CV, and to check whether a reader could find the essential criteria in 30 seconds or less.

• The weighting: how much of the post is research, how much teaching, how much administration. That decides your section order.
• The essential criteria: each one should be answerable from a line on your first two pages.
• The other documents: research statement, teaching statement, cover letter, sometimes an equality, diversity and inclusion statement. Anything they cover in prose can stay short on the CV.

Job titles do not translate one to one

Imperial sets out the UK ladder as lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor, and says UK lectureships are broadly equivalent to assistant or associate professor roles abroad; some UK universities now use those titles, so search for both. If your current title is not English, keep it and add a plain English gloss in brackets. Present the gloss as a description of the post, not as an official equivalence.

What a search committee looks for in the CV

Cambridge University Careers Service puts it bluntly: at lectureship level the deciding factor is research excellence, meaning a record of independent research plus concrete, fundable plans. Its 2016 guide says a UK lectureship typically attracts around 100 applications for one post, and that a reviewing panel concentrates on publications, their impact, invited talks, prizes and funding.

Funding shows you can run a group

A Reader quoted in the Cambridge guide says one criterion for lecturers is the ability to bring in grant money, and the guide tells applicants to include grants they helped write for their PI even when they did not hold them. Penn Career Services adds a filter from the other side: keep a grants section for significant funding, name the agency and the funded project, and move dissertation or fellowship support under honours and awards.

Teaching with level, numbers and feedback

Imperial asks applicants to list all teaching with metrics such as level, student numbers and feedback, and notes that research supervision and outreach may count. Graduate-level teaching alone can be enough for some posts, but a fellowship without teaching evidence no longer carries an application on its own.

Service: present, but brief

Penn suggests a separate section for scholarly memberships and leadership such as university committee work, and warns that a long list of other activities may suggest you are not focused enough on scholarship. Imperial, in contrast, tells lectureship applicants to make administrative roles visible, because administration is part of the job.

Referees carry more weight than outside academia

Cambridge calls referees crucial and notes that panels may be suspicious if your current supervisor or head is missing from the list, so be ready to explain an absence. Penn asks for name, title, department, institution, mailing address, phone and email for each referee you list.

Section order for a lecturer or assistant professor CV

Vanderbilt's faculty CV rubric frames the document around research, teaching and service, and says the order should follow the institution: research sections first for a tenure-track job at a research university, teaching sections first at a teaching-focused college. For a research-intensive post, this order works:

1. Header: name, current post, department, institutional email, ORCID iD.
2. Academic appointments, newest first, with exact dates.
3. Education: PhD with thesis title, supervisor and year; earlier degrees on one line each.
4. Research interests: two or three lines that point to the research statement.
5. Publications, grouped as journal articles, books and chapters, refereed conference papers, under review.
6. Grants and funding, with role, funder, years and amount.
7. Invited talks, then selected contributed talks.
8. Teaching: course, level, size, language of instruction, years, feedback.
9. Supervision of doctoral and master's students, with outcomes.
10. Service and memberships: reviewing, committees, organising.
11. Referees, usually three.

Penn adds three formatting rules worth copying: keep the most important material on the first pages, put your name and a page number on every page, and avoid a left-hand column of dates, which pulls the eye to when you did something instead of what you did.

What to leave off for US and UK posts

The Vanderbilt rubric lists personal information that should not appear: photo, birthday, race, citizenship and marital or family status. Applicants used to CVs from Türkiye or other systems that include a photo and date of birth should remove both.

Sample faculty CV: a Turkish assistant professor applying for a UK lectureship

The applicant, her universities and every number below are invented. Dr Selin Aksoy is a Doktor Öğretim Üyesi in computer engineering at a public university in Türkiye and is applying for a Lecturer in Computer Science (Data Science) post at a research-intensive UK university.

Why the sample is built this way

• Both Turkish titles stay in brackets, so the CV matches her appointment letters and diploma word for word.
• Counts sit in the publication headings, so a panel member sees the size of the record before reading a single reference.
• The lead-author note says what she did, which the co-author referee can confirm.
• Each grant names the funder and her role; Penn asks for the agency and the funded project, and Cambridge treats funding as evidence of future grant income.
• Teaching lines carry level, size, language of instruction and feedback, the metrics Imperial lists.
• The award shows how competitive it was, because Penn advises applicants from abroad to stress how competitive an unfamiliar award was.
• There is no photo, date of birth or marital status, following the Vanderbilt rubric.

Mapping a YÖK academic CV to an international faculty CV

Academics in Türkiye keep their record in YÖKSİS, the higher education information system. YÖK's own FAQ says the public YÖK Akademik profile is updated by logging in to YÖKSİS and opening Personel İşlemleri, Özgeçmiş İşlemleri, Özgeçmiş Oluşturma. Doçentlik (associate professorship) applications go through ÜAK's Doçentlik Bilgi Sistemi, which takes some data straight from YÖK, ÖSYM, ULAKBİM and TÜBİTAK systems. The left column follows the CV sections of that system as listed in ÜAK's help file for the October 2026 round.

Metrics that do not travel

ÜAK's 2026 criteria for the science and mathematics field score articles by index and quartile, from 30 points for a Q1 article in SCIE or SSCI to 10 for one in ESCI or Scopus, and DBS asks applicants to enter quartiles from Clarivate's JCR. Those labels mean little to a UK or US panel. Imperial points out that some adverts cite DORA, which moves away from journal-based metrics such as impact factors, so let the reference, the DOI and your stated role do the work.

Sources and the date we read them

University guidance changes with each hiring round. Read the advert and the department's own instructions before you send anything.

What this guide does not cover

• Writing the research statement and the teaching statement themselves; Imperial notes that one advert limited the research statement to two A4 pages.
• Visa and right-to-work questions for the country of the post.
• Promotion and appointment inside Türkiye, including doçentlik scoring, which the Turkish version of this page covers.
• Fellowship templates with fixed CV formats, covered on the postdoc CV page.

Next steps

• Format each reference consistently with the publications on a CV guide.
• Brief your three referees early; the recommendation letter guide covers how to ask.
• Applying for research posts before a faculty job? Start from the postdoc CV page.
• Leaving academia instead? The academic CV vs job CV page shows how to cut to two pages.

CitedCV builds an English, Turkish or German CV from the facts you enter and keeps each line tied to them, so the long faculty version and any shorter version share the same dates and numbers. It does not know a department's criteria; the advert does.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Imperial College London, Lectureship FAQswww.imperial.ac.uk/early-career-researcher-institute/careers-and-transitions/academic-career-paths/lectureship-faqs/
2. Penn Career Services, CVs for faculty job applicationscareerservices.upenn.edu/application-materials-for-the-faculty-job-search/cvs-for-faculty-job-applications/
3. Cambridge University Careers Service, CVs and cover letters for PhDs and postdocswww.careers.cam.ac.uk/files/phdpostdoccvbook.pdf
4. Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Academic CV review rubriccdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-main/medschool-prd/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2022/08/Facutly-job-Search-CV-review-rubric_2022.pdf
5. YÖK Akademik, Sık Sorulan Sorularakademik.yok.gov.tr/AkademikArama/view/sss.jsp
6. ÜAK, 2026 Ekim Dönemi Doçentlik Başvuru Ekranları Yardım Dosyasıwww.uak.gov.tr/documents/documents/6acce41f5cd7a.pdf
7. ÜAK, 2026 Ekim Dönemi Doçentlik Başvuru Kılavuzuwww.uak.gov.tr/documents/documents/6acce96ee706f.pdf
8. ÜAK, 2026 Ekim Fen Bilimleri ve Matematik Temel Alanı başvuru şartlarıwww.uak.gov.tr/documents/documents/6acce3cda001e.pdf