Your CV is the spine of the application — every claim in your personal statement and letters needs to map back to a line in the CV. Tech Nation also requires a supporting evidence pack (PDFs, links, screenshots) for every external claim. Make personal attribution obvious; quantify impact with real numbers; trim anything older than five years that doesn't directly help.
The CV's job
For Tech Nation, the CV isn't just a job history. It's the document that frames every other piece of evidence. Assessors read it once at the start to understand your shape, and refer back to it constantly while reading your letters and personal statement.
Recommended structure
- Header: name, current role, location, contact, links (GitHub, personal site, LinkedIn).
- Summary (3-4 lines): who you are professionally, your sector and seniority, one anchor achievement.
- Work history (chronological): for each role — company, role, dates, 3-5 bullets of personal achievements with metrics. Mark scope where possible (team size, budget, customers).
- External evidence sections: Speaking, Publications, Open Source, Awards, Patents, Mentoring, Media Mentions. One section per category you have evidence for. Each entry with date and link/proof.
- Education: brief — only degrees, dates, institutions. No grade trivia unless you're using OC4.
Personal attribution: the make-or-break detail
Tech Nation rejects more CVs for the same reason year after year: team accomplishments described without naming what the applicant personally did. The fix is to rewrite each achievement using this template:
What the team/company achieved + what I personally led/built/decided + measurable outcome attributable to me.
Weak: "Helped grow ARR by 4x." Strong: "Led the platform rebuild from monolith to microservices as tech lead of 6 engineers; redesigned the data layer that reduced checkout p99 latency from 1.2s to 180ms, contributing to a 4x ARR growth."
Quantify everything
- Team size you led or scope you owned
- Revenue, ARR, customers, or users affected
- Performance, reliability, cost, or quality improvements with before/after numbers
- Funding raised (if relevant), valuation milestones
- GitHub stars, downloads, contributor count for OSS
- Audience size, attendee count, viewership for speaking
The evidence pack
Every external claim in your CV needs supporting evidence. Tech Nation calls this the "evidence portfolio" — typically a single PDF with each item tabbed and labelled.
- Awards: PDF certificate, screenshot of organisation's shortlist page, or news article.
- Speaking: conference programme listing your talk, video recording, or organiser confirmation email.
- Open source: link to your GitHub profile, commit history, repo stats, list of merged PRs into named projects.
- Publications: links to articles, DOI for academic papers, screenshots of mastheads.
- Patents: Google Patents link with verifiable ID.
- Mentoring: programme website + email confirmation of your role, not just a personal claim.
- Media mentions: link or PDF screenshot of articles that name you specifically (not your company in passing).
What to trim
- Roles older than 5 years that don't add evidence of trajectory
- Education unrelated to tech (a humanities degree from 15 years ago doesn't help)
- Generic training certificates (AWS Solution Architect, Coursera courses)
- Internal company awards or recognition
- Hobbies, interests, languages (unless they directly support evidence)
The CV-to-statement-to-letters chain
The three documents — CV, personal statement, and recommendation letters — must reinforce each other. If a letter says "X led the data platform migration", the CV should have that as a quantified bullet, and the personal statement should mention it as part of the narrative. Assessors check for inconsistencies, and gaps weaken the whole application.