Executive assistant CV guides · by Lily Shippen, EA recruiter

Personal assistant CV: how to write one that brings your job to life

Written by Lily Shippen, founder of the Lily Shippen EA, PA and chief of staff recruitment agency. Thirteen years of shortlisting, tens of thousands of CVs read, and every rule on this page is one I use at my own desk. Who I am

I place personal assistants and executive assistants, and I'd say the two roles are interchangeable far more often than the job adverts admit, because a PA can be doing an EA's job and an EA can be doing a PA's, and I stopped reading much into the title years ago. What I can't stop reading into is the description underneath it, and the PA CVs I see are, on average, further from what they could be than the EA ones, not because PAs do less but because PAs describe what they do more modestly, and a recruiter with two hundred CVs in the inbox takes modesty at face value.

So here's how to write one that shows the job you actually do, starting with what a finished one looks like.

A complete personal assistant CV

Amira Khan isn't a real person but a composite of PAs I've placed, and every figure is the kind of figure a real PA CV should carry, so read it first, then the reasoning below, and then put yours beside it.

Notice what you know about Amira after ten lines, which is the founder, the firm, the two charity boards, the homes, the school run and the £1,500 she can sign for, so that you can picture her week, and that's the test every CV has to pass. Everything below is the reasoning behind it, and the annotated PA CV example walks through a second one line by line.

PA or EA: does the title matter?

It matters less than you'd think, and I say that as someone who places both, because the two titles overlap and swap from one employer to the next. A PA supporting one principal, running their life as well as their work with real say over what reaches them, is doing what most people would call an EA's job, whereas an EA supporting a team of four with no authority over anyone's diary is doing what most people would call a PA's, so the title on your last contract tells me which word your employer preferred rather than what you did.

So use the title your employer gave you, because a recruiter will check it against LinkedIn and your references, and then let the line underneath describe the job, since "Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive of a 300-person housing association" tells me more than any title could. If you're applying for roles called EA, don't change your title, because once you describe your job properly the title stops mattering.

What to lead with

These are the four things that let me picture your world, and they belong in the first half of page one, in the profile and the key achievements, before anything else.

1. Who you support and at what scale is your principal's title, what the business does, how big it is, how many offices, and whether the support is business only or business and private, because this is the setting and without it nothing else makes sense.
2. What you decide alone might be a spend limit, a category of meeting you decline, suppliers you appoint, or the household or travel arrangements you run without sign-off, and it's the line most PA CVs are missing, which is a shame because it's the one that tells me how capable you are by showing me what someone trusted you with.
3. Scale is meetings a week, trips a year, events and their guest numbers, budgets you hold and people you coordinate, because figures turn "busy" into something I can see.
4. Something you built or fixed could be a travel policy, a filing system that other assistants now use, a supplier renegotiated or an onboarding process for new starters, and it tells me you improve things rather than just keeping them going.

A personal assistant profile that works

The profile is the short paragraph at the top, and here's the kind most PAs write followed by what I'd write instead.

Notice there isn't one adjective about the person in the second version, because every word describes the work and that's what makes it hers, so cover the name and it could only be one PA, which is the test every profile has to pass, and there are five more worked examples in the profile guide.

Private support belongs on the CV

PAs often leave the private side out, either because it feels like it doesn't count or because it feels indiscreet to mention, and it counts enormously, because running a principal's family diary, homes, staff, travel and personal finances is trust of the highest kind and the employers who need it pay for it. Write it the way you'd write the business side, with scale and boundaries and without a single detail that would identify the family, because "Manage the private affairs of the principal and his family: two households, four staff, school and medical diaries, and all personal travel" is enough for me to see the job and to see that you know how to keep it private.

The mistakes that get PAs overlooked

• A skills list with no context. "Diary management, travel, minute taking, Microsoft Office" appears on every PA CV in the pile, so it can't tell me anything about you, whereas if you keep the section and give each skill its scale on the same line, as in "Diary management: about 30 meetings a week, business and private", then I can see your level, and the skills guide shows how.
• Duties written as duties. "Responsible for diary management" is a job description, whereas "Manage a diary of 25 to 30 meetings a week across two time zones, with authority to decline and reschedule without sign-off" is a CV, and it's the same job written so that I can see it.
• The current role squeezed. The role you're in now should take the most space, because it's read first and hardest, so give it six to eight bullets with figures and let earlier roles have a short paragraph and two or three bullets each.
• No dates or the wrong dates. Give month and year for anything in the last eight years, and give a gap of a year or more one plain clause rather than a silence, because I'd far rather read "a year out to care for a parent" than wonder.
• Two columns, tables and icons. They look modern and they break the software that stores CVs before a person sees them, so keep to a single column, standard headings and real text.

If the role you want next is called EA

Don't rewrite your title and don't apologise for it, but describe the job you do now so fully that the reader can see you doing the next one, because the things an EA search tends to ask me about are who you deal with on the principal's behalf, what you decide without them and something you own end to end, whether a board cycle, an events programme or a budget. Most experienced PAs already have all three and have just never written them down, and the PA to EA guide covers how to show the level you already work at while the skills guide lists the eight things I read for and how to evidence each one.

How this is marked

The free scorer on this site marks a PA CV exactly the same way it marks an EA CV, on five things, which are personality, proof, content, trust and format, and it tells you the three changes that would move it most. When Margot writes your CV she asks the questions above in her own order and writes each answer into a line as you go, which is the easiest way I know to get the figures out of your head and onto the page, and the free template shows the structure that keeps it readable by people and software alike.

Lily Shippen

FOUNDER, LILY SHIPPEN, EA, PA AND CHIEF OF STAFF RECRUITMENT · THIRTEEN YEARS PLACING EAS

Lily has read tens of thousands of EA CVs and shortlisted the ones that worked. Margot is her screening interview, written down. About Lily and this site