An International Medical Graduate (IMG) CV frequently arrives here in good order by the standards of the country it was written in, and it still leaves a UK reader unable to answer a basic question: what was this doctor actually doing, and at what level of responsibility?
Everything below is about closing that gap. None of it involves changing what you did.
Explain the seniority, do not just state the title
A job title that is entirely clear in Lahore, Cairo or Lagos may carry no meaning to somebody shortlisting in Leeds. Titles like Medical Officer, House Officer, Senior House Officer, Registrar and Resident are used differently across systems, and some are used in the UK too but for different things, which is worse than being unfamiliar.
Give the title as it was, then say what the job involved. Something like: "Medical Officer, general medicine. Independent management of an acute medical intake, on call one night in four, supervising two junior colleagues." A reader can now place you. The title alone did not let them.
Do not claim direct UK grade equivalence unless it can be justified. An overseas job title may not map neatly to foundation, SHO or registrar terminology. Where the title is unfamiliar, explain the seniority, responsibilities, level of supervision and clinical scope rather than simply relabelling the post with a UK grade.
Put registration where it will be seen
GMC registration status is one of the first things checked. Whatever your position, state it plainly near the top: registered with a licence to practise and the reference number, or provisionally registered, or the stage you have reached if the application is in progress. If you have passed PLAB or hold an accepted alternative, that belongs alongside it, with dates.
Leaving this to be inferred from context creates work for the reader and uncertainty in the answer.
Give unfamiliar institutions a scale
Nobody shortlisting in the UK knows how big your hospital was. A short parenthesis fixes it: bed numbers, whether it was a tertiary referral centre, whether it took trauma, roughly what the intake was. One clause is enough. "(850-bed tertiary referral centre, regional trauma unit)" tells a reader more about the setting than the hospital's name ever will.
Use the section order a UK reader expects
Personal and registration details, then a short professional profile naming the post you want, then qualifications, then employment in reverse chronological order, then audit and quality improvement, teaching, leadership, research and publications, then courses and finally references. Reverse chronological order matters and is often the biggest single change we make: many CVs arrive oldest first, so the reader meets your house-officer year before your current post.
Photographs, date of birth, marital status, religion and nationality appear on CVs in many countries and are conventionally left off in the UK. Removing them is not a judgement on your CV. It just makes it look like the others in the pile.
Do not thin out the clinical detail
There is a habit among International Medical Graduates of compressing years of substantial work into two lines, on the assumption that overseas experience counts for less. Sometimes the strongest material on the whole document is the part that got compressed. High-volume acute work, procedural numbers, running a unit with limited senior cover: these are real and they should be on the page with numbers attached where you have them.
What we cannot do
We cannot make overseas experience count as UK experience where a post explicitly requires the latter, and we will not word a CV so as to blur which is which. We also cannot advise you on visas, registration routes or eligibility, and you should treat anything you read on a CV website about those as a starting point for asking someone qualified.
What is genuinely fixable is the translation problem, and in our experience that is most of what is wrong with these documents.
This is guidance on writing a CV. It is not immigration, registration or careers advice.