Writing Your Professional CV with LaTeX

by Alessandro

Hello, and welcome to this website.

Please let me note before we move on that anything you find on this website is (legally) free. You do not have to pay neither for the software, nor for the fonts I will be using.

At the moment, I am skipping the installation part of the LaTeX system, you can find useful directions here.

It is very simple, but I promise to make a screencast for the installation process if anyone’s actually interested. Let me know.

Your Professional CV in LaTeX

Before we move on with some code, let’s take a peek at what we will build from scratch:

And now let’s get our hands dirty! Any LaTeX document starts with a declaration of the class the document belongs to. This includes setting the paper height and width, the standard font size, margins, etc.

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}

Next we load some packages which will help us out in typesetting the document

 %A Few Useful Packages
\usepackage{marvosym}
\usepackage{fontspec}			%load fonts
\usepackage{url,parskip}			%formatting
\usepackage{xunicode,xltxtra} 	%other packages for XeTeX
 
%Graphics - Colors
\RequirePackage{color,graphicx}
\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{xcolor}
%better formatting of the A4 page
\usepackage[big]{layaureo}
%An alternative to Layaureo can be usepackage{fullpage}
 
\usepackage{supertabular} 		%for Grades
\usepackage{titlesec}			%custom section
 
%Setup hyperref package, and colours for links
\usepackage{hyperref}
\definecolor{linkcolour}{rgb}{0,0.2,0.6}
\hypersetup{colorlinks,breaklinks, urlcolor=linkcolour, linkcolor=linkcolour}

A fundamental choice is that of the font: this is up to you, but in this version I’m using Fontin, which looks professional and in this way we can give a personal look to the document.

%FONTS
\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
\setmainfont[SmallCapsFont = Fontin SmallCaps]{Fontin}

Important: the way in which your system chooses the name of fonts could be different from mine, generating the following error message

! Font @tempfonta=Fontin at 10.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file or install ed font not found.

If this kind of problem occurs, there is something wrong with the name of the font you are using, but this depends on your system architecture (Linux, Macintosh, Windows). Last thing we tweak is appearance of sections as produced by the obscure command: section

%CV Sections inspired by:
%http://stefano.italians.nl/archives/26
\titleformat{section}{Largescshaperaggedright}{}{0em}{}[\titlerule]
\titlespacing{section}{0pt}{3pt}{3pt}

where I found a very important hint at this website. This tweak will eliminate numbers from section headings, format them in Large size, apply small caps as font family, and finally draw a rule after the section title. The final resul will be

Custom Section Headings

Custom Section Headings

We are now ready to begin writing the document!

%-------BEGIN DOCUMENT--------
\begin{document}

we then remove page numbers from the footer of the document with

 \pagestyle{empty} % non-numbered pages

A CV usually starts with your name,

 %--------------------TITLE-------------
\par{\centering
{\Huge Alessandro \textsc{Plasmati} }
\bigskip\par}

then we can move on to the sections of the CV. If you happen to have work experience, you should put this section first, starting from the most recent job — your prospective employer wants to read what you’re doing at the moment more than he wants to read what you did five years ago.

Therefore, we need to insert the following sections in the CV:

  1. Personal Data, the most important part of it being your email address, mobile number, and date of birth.
  2. Work Experience, detailing when and where you worked, and a brief description of your daily job.
  3. Education, again starting from your last degree
  4. Additional Info which are relevant for the job, including scholarships, certificates, languages, interests, etc.
 %Section: Personal Data
\section{Personal Data}
\begin{tabular}{rl}
\textsc{Place and Date of Birth:} & Someplace, Italy  | dd Month 1912\\
\textsc{Address:}	& CV Inn 19, 20301, Milano, Italy\\
\textsc{Phone:}	& +39 123 456789\\
\textsc{email:}	& \href{mailto:alessandro.plasmati@gmail.com}{alessandro.plasmati@gmail.com}\\
\end{tabular}

which yields the following section

Personal Data Section

Personal Data Section

then we have the following section named «Work Experience»

which is rendered by the following code

%Section: Work Experience at the top
\section{Work Experience}
\begin{tabular}{r|p{11cm}}
\emph{Current} & Your job at Your Company, Town \\
\textsc{Jan 2009} \emph{What your company does} \\
& \footnotesize{A description of what you do,
because your job's name can be meaningless to the reader}\\
\multicolumn{2}{c}{}\ %this clears the space between two jobs
%some other job here
\end{tabular}

We then boast our wonderful educational background with something of this nature: 

%Section: Education
\section{Education}
\begin{tabular}{rl}
\textsc{July} 2008 & Master of Science in \textsc{Finance},
\textbf{Bocconi University}, Milan\\
 & 110/110 \small\emph{summa cum laude}
 | Major: Quantitative Finance\ & Thesis: ``Sublinear and Locally Sublinear Prices'' |
\small Advisor: Prof. Erio \textsc{Castagnoli} &\normalsize \textsc{Gpa}: 28.61/30
\hyperlink{grds}{\hfill | \footnotesize Detailed List of Exams}\\
 &\\
%some other degree here
\end{tabular}

notice the hyperlink{grds}: it is an internal hyperlink to another section of the CV. In fact, it will redirect your user to the target you specify in your LaTeX source document with the simple command hypertarget{<name>} Additional sections can be much like the following image:

This is basically all for this part, it’s a very long post already ;)

You can find the LaTeX source at the end of the tutorial.

Remember: you need to compile the source with XeLaTeX otherwise it is not going to work. Feel free to contact me in the comments if you need help with anything.

Last but not least, a pdf version of the CV can be found if you click on the icon.

XeLaTeX Source

Source Code

PDF Output

PDF Output

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