You have a corporate CV that works. Two pages, tight bullets, a number on almost every line, and it has been producing interviews since your first promotion. For a lectureship or a research fellowship it will not do the job, and the problem is genre rather than quality.
The reader changes, so the document changes
A recruiter screens for disqualifiers in under a minute. A hiring committee is four to eight academics in your subject area plus an administrator, and they read the whole file before they ever meet you. They are not scanning for fit. They are filling in a comparison grid whose columns already have names in their heads: research output, funding, teaching, service, external recognition. If a column is empty on your CV, they do not assume you have something there that you forgot to mention. They record a blank and move on.
That one fact drives everything below. You are not selling anymore. You are supplying evidence in a shape the panel can score. The opposite move, taking an academic CV into a company, is a different craft and I have written about it separately in the guide on converting an academic CV into an industry resume.
What you add that a company CV never has
The publication list. Full citations, reverse chronological, DOIs where they exist. If you have four items and three of them came out of a masters or doctorate finished a decade ago, list all four anyway. What you must not do is quietly mix categories. Give peer-reviewed articles their own heading, then conference papers, then book chapters, then patents, then a clearly labelled block for white papers, technical reports and industry publications. A committee can tell the difference in two seconds. Padding an unrefereed report into the refereed list is the fastest way to lose a panel's trust.
Conference activity. Every talk you have given, with the format named: invited talk, contributed talk, poster, panel, workshop you organised. Industry conferences count, and a keynote at a serious domain event reads as external recognition, which is a category panels care about and most industry candidates leave out entirely.
Teaching, or the nearest thing you have. You probably have more than you think. An internal certification course you designed and delivered eleven times. Onboarding curricula. Two apprentices and four junior engineers you formally mentored, with dates. Guest lectures at a local university. Give the session counts, audience sizes and feedback scores if you kept them. Then write the teaching statement, usually a separate document, and make sure the CV has a Teaching section it can hang on.
Funding. This is the section most industry applicants skip, and skipping it is a mistake. If you wrote the internal business case that unlocked a two hundred thousand budget for an eighteen month project, that is a funding application under another name. Format it like a grant line: your role, the source, the amount, the period, the project title. If your employer sat in a Horizon Europe or national consortium, list it and state your actual role honestly, whether that was work package lead or contributor. Panels read money you have moved as a proxy for whether you can bring money in.
Referees, service and methods. Named referees with title, institution, email and phone, on the CV itself, not "available on request". Three is standard and at least one should be academic if you can manage it. Then professional service: journal or conference reviewing, programme committees, standards bodies, open source maintainership, editorial work. Finally recast your tooling as method. Not a skills cloud reading Python, SQL, Spark, but a line reading: causal inference on observational panel data, Bayesian hierarchical models, implementation in Python and Stan.
What you cut or rebuild
The two-page rule goes first. An academic CV of nine pages is normal and correct, and brevity buys you nothing on a panel. Length is read as output. What replaces the page limit is ruthless ordering, because the reader gives a fair amount of attention to page one and skims the rest.
Cut the achievement bullets built on revenue. Grew ARR by thirty-four percent, reduced churn, exceeded target: none of that scores in any column the panel has. Where you do want scale, express it in system or data terms instead, such as a pipeline over forty million records or a deployment across nine countries.
Cut internal product names and corporate vocabulary. "Led Project Halo across three squads in the Atlas tribe" is unreadable outside your building. Say what the technical problem was.
Cut the profile summary. It was written for a recruiter and it will be read as marketing. Either replace it with three or four lines of research statement naming your questions and methods, or delete it and let the education and appointments sections open the file.
Cut the visual design. Two columns, colour blocks, skill bars, an icon set, a logo. All of it signals that you have not read an academic CV recently. One column, one font, plain headings, a PDF that prints cleanly. If you want a model for section order before you rebuild, the breakdown in the piece on lecturer and professor CV structure is the layout to copy.
Reframing industry work as research output
The failure mode here is describing your job. Nobody on the panel cares that you owned a roadmap. Describe the questions instead.
Take the same project three ways. As a company bullet: "Delivered fraud detection platform, saved 4.2M in annual losses." As a research line: "Developed and evaluated a graph-based anomaly detection method for payment fraud on a live transaction stream, benchmarked against three baselines, deployed at national scale." Same work. The second version tells a panel what the contribution was, what was compared, and at what scale it held up.
Where NDAs bite, name the method and the scale and omit the client. "Details subject to confidentiality, available on request" is a normal line on these CVs and nobody blinks at it.
The publication gap, handled without apology
Somebody will notice the six-item gap since your last paper. Do not explain it on the CV. Explanation belongs in the letter, and the structure for that argument sits in the guide to writing an academic cover letter.
On the CV, close the gap with something recent and real. A preprint on arXiv. A methods paper written from work you can legally publish. A review of your subfield. A conference submission, listed honestly as under review with the venue named. One dated item from this year changes how the whole list reads, because it tells the panel you are currently producing rather than currently remembering.
Do this before you touch anything: open a blank document and build the academic section order first, empty, then move content across from the corporate CV one line at a time. Whatever has no section to land in does not belong in the file. That single constraint will do most of the conversion for you in an afternoon.