Nutritionist CV Example

A nutritionist CV that includes all the necessary details and is tailored carefully to the job description puts you in a great position. It can help you pass the ATS screening stage, make a strong impression with the employer and reach the latter stages of the recruitment process. Now let’s explore the main sections of a CV and see how to structure each one for maximum impact.

Standard nutritionist CV sections

Your approach to creating your winning nutritionist CV will differ depending on your experience, your seniority and the details listed in the job description.

However, at any stage of your career, a nutritionist CV serves as a professional biography that must clearly illustrate your career trajectory. To help you tell that story effectively, we will now break down the document piece-by-piece, starting with your contact header and moving through the key pieces of your professional path.

CV Header

Start your nutritionist CV with a professional-looking header that includes all the relevant contact information. This usually includes your name, your email address, your phone number and your location, but not your full address. Additionally, consider adding a URL to your LinkedIn profile if you have one. This can help the reader to quickly access further information about your career and credentials that you haven't been able to add to your CV.

For jobs in the UK, a personal photo is usually not required on your CV. That, along with any other personal details such as age, gender, ethnicity and nationality, are generally discouraged under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, which aims to reduce and eliminate discriminatory practices, such as recruitment bias.

CV Objective

The first section below your CV header is typically your CV summary. This short paragraph outlines some of your key skills, achievements and experience, so employers can quickly get an impression of whether you have the right credentials for the nutritionist job. A CV summary focuses on your key skills and achievements, while a CV objective provides an alternative approach, showcasing your career ambitions and how the role fits with these. This makes a CV objective ideal for entry-level candidates.

Both a CV summary and objective should be concise, with an ideal length of two or three sentences. List your key skills, personal strengths and career achievements or ambitions, taking care to ensure the content reflects the requirements listed in the job description.

An effective summary will include brief reference to one or two of your strongest skills, ensuring they reflect the skills listed in the job description. It's important to make your skills and qualities feel unique to you, and show how you've used them to positive effect in your career to date. Find an example below of a positive nutritionist CV summary, characterised by evidence to support your claims and well-structured, easy-to-read sentences.

Above is an example of CV summary that doesn't follow best practice, with some subtle shortcomings and failings. For a summary to make less of an impact, it might include generic or vague information, lack evidence of your impact, or fail to highlight specific personal qualities that make you stand out from other candidates. It may also lack tailoring to the job description or include long, poorly structured sentences.

Work Experience

A CV's work experience section is usually its most important element. Employers tend to value the work experience section, as it shows evidence of how you've put your relevant skills to good use in your career to date. Ensure you tailor your work experience section to reflect the job description and show you meet all the essential requirements. This means picking out skills and qualities as keywords and reflecting them back in your work experience bullet points, so employers can assess your likely fit for the role.

List only relevant previous jobs, and add your job title, the name of the employer, its location and your dates of employment. Under this, write several bullet points showing employers how your skills and key qualities contributed to positive outcomes.

Standing out with your CV work experience section means using action verbs and measurable outcomes to show the impact you made. You'll want to outline a progression in your skills development, and list evidence of the value you added. Here's an example of best practice in a nutritionist CV work experience section:

Take a look at a less strong nutritionist CV work experience section above. The work experience section could fail to make an impression if it's too generic, focuses on older or irrelevant roles or lacks tailoring to the job description. It's also important to avoid focusing too much on responsibilities that don't tell the reader anything of the value you added to the role.

Education and Qualifications

With your education section, you'll draw attention to your most recent and highest qualifications, particularly emphasising any qualifications listed as a requirement in the job description.

A degree is typically a strict requirement for nutritionist jobs, and as such, you'll want to showcase yours in your CV. If you have a Bachelor of Science in Nutritional Science or another similar, relevant degree that confirms your eligibility for the position, include it in your CV. You might also wish to add other degrees or qualifications that highlight your strongest skills, such as menu planning software proficiency or food labelling regulation compliance.

Your education section should contain only the qualifications that you consider most relevant to the role. List them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working back from there. When adding each qualification, include the name and level of the award, the institution, its location (if necessary), and the dates you attended or graduated. It can also be valuable to add bullet points outlining your key achievements and activities, such as projects you worked on, modules you completed, awards you won or societies you participated in while studying.

You might also wish to add specialist qualifications, certifications or licences that are required for the role. If you add any of these, include the expiry date, if the qualification requires renewal in the future.

Key Skills

In your CV skills section, include a combination of the key hard and soft skills you possess, that make you a suitable candidate for the position. Make sure your skills list reflects the requirements specified in the job description, and include a few skills that are unique to you, and help set you apart from the pack. For a nutritionist CV, it's valuable to highlight essential skills from your skill set, such as time management and proficiency in nutritional biochemistry, to grab the attention of hiring managers and show you're qualified for the nutritionist position.

Hard Skills

Hard skills and technical skills are the specialist skills required for completing the everyday duties of the role, such as the use of certain software or equipment, or specialist industry knowledge. You can develop these skills through study, training, on-the-job or through completing industry certifications. For nutritionist jobs, essential hard skills from your career-to-date might include body composition analysis techniques, and proficiency in nutritional biochemistry. Check the skills specified in the job description, and add four or five key hard skills to your CV that show employers you're capable of completing the key duties of the role.

You'll want to include a list of hard skills that closely matches the skills listed as 'essential' or 'desirable' in the job description, while also reflecting your own strongest technical skills.

Below, you can find the types of skills typically featured in the hard skills section of a nutritionist CV:

Soft Skills

Soft skills are the personal strengths and qualities that show employers how well you'll fit into the role and complement other members of the team. Soft skills tend to be more transferable and applicable to different roles than hard and technical skills. Transferable skills are among the most in-demand skills for employers, with rapidly changing and evolving ways of working requiring ever-more flexible and adaptable employees. Soft skills are also highly valuable for junior and entry-level positions, where candidates aren't expected to have a wealth of relevant work experience and career achievements.

As with your nutritionist CV hard skills list, review the job description to learn the key soft skills for the role. Include the best soft skills that you can provide evidence for throughout your CV. Create a list of four or five transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with the skills that help you to stand out as a unique and compelling candidate for the position.

The section below provides an overview of soft skills often highlighted in a nutritionist CV.

Languages

Adding foreign language skills to your nutritionist CV can be a valuable addition that reflects well on you as a candidate. Even if language skills aren't listed as a requirement in the job description, if you speak a foreign language, it can be beneficial to add it to your CV. Within this section, list the foreign languages you speak to a reasonable degree of competence, together with an indicator of your skill levels.

There are several methods of confirming your foreign language skills on your CV. The simplest way is by assigning a basic descriptive word, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

You could adopt the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), as this provides standardised levels to describe your competence, as follows:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Certifications and Training

Depending on the role you're applying for, and the type of qualifications you have, you might want to include a separate section for certifications, in addition to the education section. It can enhance your chances of success to show specific training and certifications. Not only do these prove you're qualified for the role, but they also indicate proactivity and a dedication to professional development. In addition, some roles require specific licences or training just to be eligible for the job, making the certifications section more important. This might include technical roles or positions which require the operation of specialist software, equipment or machinery.

These example certifications and licences are ideal for candidates applying for nutritionist roles:

Additional Information

Including optional sections in addition to the core sections of your nutritionist CV can help you to show employers you're a strong candidate for the job. If you're unable to show you have all the necessary skills for the job through your work experience, optional sections can be a valid way of providing further evidence of your suitability, to give you the chance of gaining an interview. If you're an entry-level candidate or a career changer, optional sections can be particularly valuable.

Explore our career resources for practical strategies to make your CV stand out and move you closer to landing an interview.

Hobbies and Interests

If you have any hobbies and interests that can showcase skills relevant to the job description, it might be worth including them. Additionally, this section gives you the chance to show employers different facets of your personality and interests beyond work, which can help them to differentiate you from other applicants. However, a hobbies and interests section is only valuable if it helps you to show relevant skills you've been unable to evidence in other parts of your CV. If your hobbies and interests are unrelated to the job, it's best to leave them off your CV.

Achievements and Awards

Compiling your key career achievements into a single list is an effective way of making your CV more readable at a glance. If you've been awarded any prizes or accolades, or reached any key career milestones, these can all help to show you have the required status and experience for the role.

Voluntary Work

Listing any previous voluntary work is another useful way of showing you have the necessary skills and experience for the job. If you don't have much relevant work experience, either because you're a junior candidate or you're changing jobs from an unrelated field, volunteering can provide valuable examples of your skills in action. In your volunteering section, use a similar structure to your work experience section.

Add your job title or a description of the volunteer role, the organisation name, its location and the dates you volunteered (start and end date). Under this, add bullet points to show the skills you used, and evidence of how they contributed to positive achievements for the organisation.

Top action words to use in a nutritionist CV

Starting each of your work experience bullet points with strong action verbs is a great way to showcase your key skills and qualities, and demonstrate the impact they've had in your career to date. Start each bullet point with a verb linked to the skills required in the job description, to add focus to your work experience section and make it easy for the reader to identify your strengths. Remember to always back up the action verbs you use with quantifiable evidence that shows the impact you made. You can use past tense for any action verbs describing previous jobs, with present tense for action verbs to describe your current role and responsibilities.

Nutritionist CV example

Now that we've covered the main sections to include in your nutritionist CV, we can see how it would all come together in its final form in the example below:

If you want a sneak preview of what your one-page, fully designed and finalised CV might look like, see our completed examples.

How to optimise your CV for ATS screening

Many employers now use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to assist with managing the recruitment process. One of the key elements of most ATS apps is the ability to scan CVs and rank them according to their likely match to the job description. By taking on this task, the systems can save hiring managers the time and effort of reviewing every CV in detail. With vacancies regularly receiving hundreds of applications, this can increase the efficiency of the recruitment process.

The growing prevalence of ATS apps requires a shift in approach by jobseekers, to prepare a CV with the best chance of passing the ATS screening stage. That's why we've put together a list of key ATS CV tips, to maximise your chances of success:

• Include keywords and phrases that mirror the job description, increasing your chances of ranking highly in the ATS screening stage.
• Use standard CV headings that make your CV easier to navigate, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Choose a simple, straightforward CV layout with clear, consistent formatting, that avoids text boxes, graphics or other special design elements, as these can make your CV harder to scan.
• Select a font that can enhance the readability of your CV, such as popular serif and sans serif fonts, with size 10 to 12 for body text and 14 to 16 for headings.
• Use bullet points in place of full sentences and paragraphs. This can reduce the overall length of the document, make the keywords stand out and make it easier for ATS apps to scan.

You might feel there are a lot of steps to creating an ATS-compatible nutritionist CV, but with just a few small changes, you can ensure your CV passes this stage. Use one of our ATS-compatible CV templates, which are designed by experts to give you the best chances of success.

Key takeaways for your nutritionist CV

To make a strong first impression on hiring managers, tailor your CV for every application, adding keywords and phrases that match the job description. Choose the most fitting CV format for your experience level, and focus on showcasing how you've developed the necessary skills for the role, and used them to positive effect in previous roles.

Finally, using a clean, professional CV template like those offered by Jobseeker, can help your CV stand out among its competitors and give you the best chance of success with your applications.

Sources:

1. Barnet Council (UK local government), Recruitment tips: How to write a supporting statement
2. Jobseeker, HR Trends