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The gap-free CV, and what a German reader checks first
A German CV is read for two things before anyone reads what you did: whether the dates are complete, and whether they are in the expected order. Complete means lückenlos. Every month from the end of school to today should be accounted for, and a gap of more than two or three months is something a reader will notice and ask about at the interview. This is not suspicion of you personally; it is a convention, and the fix is simply to name the gap rather than hide it. Reisen, Elternzeit, Pflege eines Angehörigen, berufliche Neuorientierung, Sprachkurs — a single line with dates closes it, and an honestly labelled gap is a non-event. An unexplained one invites the question you least want. Order: reverse chronological, newest first, is now the norm, and it arrived recently enough that older German advice still says the opposite. Either is survivable; what is not is mixing them. The standard sections are Persönliche Daten, Berufserfahrung, Ausbildung, Kenntnisse, and optionally a short Interessen. Two pages is the ceiling and one is fine. Two details that look wrong to an Anglophone and are right here. The CV is dated and signed at the bottom — an actual signature, scanned or drawn, under the place and date. And there is no equivalent of references available on request: German applications attach the written Zeugnisse themselves, as lesson 53 described, so there is nothing to promise later. One thing to leave out that English CVs often include: a personal statement or profile paragraph at the top. Argument belongs in the Anschreiben. A CV that opens with a paragraph about your passion for the field reads, to a German recruiter, as a letter that has landed in the wrong file.