Who Is the Average UK Job Hunter? 2024 CV Research

Job hunting is tough. Not only do you need to create a stunning CV that grabs the attention of potential recruiters—You also need one so compelling it outshines the competition. But who exactly is your competition? Are your skills and qualifications enough to succeed in today’s fiercely competitive job market?

We analyzed over 6.5 million user CVs and created the average UK job hunter persona. In this article, we’ll share our insightful findings.

Who is the average candidate: results and methodology

Obviously, a lot goes into a candidate’s qualifications, and even more nuanced is how everyone chooses to show them on their CVs. For this analysis, we focused on the following areas:

• Number of years of experience
• Most likely job positions and time spent in each job
• Education
• Key skills added to a CV
• Added certifications
• Known languages
• Length of a CV
• The time spent to write a CV
• Inclusion of a cover letter

And the findings look like this: 

Below you’ll find a sample CV for our persona, John Average, representing the average job hunter in the UK. Underneath this example, we’ll share the intriguing data we uncovered from our analysis of over 6.5 million CVs.

Average UK job hunter’s CV sample

Persona breakdown & analysis findings

In this section, we’ll present detailed findings from Our CV builder to shine a light on the UK’s workforce qualifications:

Work sector

The modern workforce is evolving rapidly, shaped by technological advancements, shifts in economic priorities, and the enduring need for human-centered roles. The data we extracted from our CV builder reveals the most common job roles and industries in the UK. Here are the top 5:

1. Management Roles constituted 21.47% of all of our users.
2. Clerical and Administrative Work was performed by 14.06% of our users.
3. Sales and Customer-Facing Roles make up 11.43% of our users.
4. Technology Professionals represent 8.83% of our users.
5. Education Workers include about 6.39% of our users.

As you can see, the most common roles in the UK are managerial positions, such as business services managers, managing directors, and retail trade managers. This reflects the high representation of leadership and administrative roles in the workforce.

However, the aforementioned John Average persona is only now applying for a managerial position while in the group that represents Sales and Customer-Facing Roles. You’ll see why in the next section.

Professional experience

Let’s dissect John Average’s work history. He currently has 6 years and 9 months of experience, which is the average work experience reported by our users.

He currently works at his second company. As found by an insurance company Liverpool Victoria, and reported by media outlets like the BBC, the average UK worker switches jobs every 5 years.

John Average also has 2 previous job titles. Our findings on job count reveal that:

• Only 1.6% of users had no past work experience on their CV.
• 30.61% of our users report having only 1 job count.
• 23.16% of our user base had 2 previous jobs on their CVs.
• 17.32% of our users report having 3 past jobs.
• 10.98% of our user base show 4 past jobs on their CVs.

So, why has John had more than 1 past job? It’s due to his roles and the average experience time our users report at each role. Here are the top 15 most popular roles in the UK, and the average work experience (in months) our users held for each of them:

Looking at the table, it’s all great for John Average. He held a 22-month internship at a company. Later, he became full-time work as a customer service representative at the same firm. And now, as he is close to reaching the average time for this role, he is looking for a managerial position.

What’s interesting is that very few people have any experience with remote jobs. Only 0.29% of our users reported having a remote job. This means that on-site employment is vastly dominating in the UK.

Education

When it comes to the level of education, most UK job hunters report having higher education status. The most popular among them are:

• Bachelor of Science—7.7%
• Certificate of Higher Education—5.34%
• Diploma of Higher Education—4.59%
• Bachelor of Arts—3.89%

Other unspecified Bachelor’s Degrees account for roughly 7.14% of the data. About 10.24% of job hunters hold master's degrees of all kinds. 7.37% have high school written on their CVs, while 7.01% report secondary education.

When it comes to the most popular university degrees, the data shows that:

• 2.37% of users have a Computer Science degree.
• 1.76% pursued a degree in Commerce.
• 1.51% studied Informational Technology.
• 1.50% hold a degree in Accounting.
• 1.12% specialized in Mechanical Engineering.

As for the number of schools included on a CV:

• 44.6% of users only add 1 school.
• 22.84% showcase 2 schools.
• 18.88% highlight 3 schools.
• And 8.13% include 4 schools on a CV.

Also, 54.92% of our users report having already finished their education, 22.43% are currently still learning, and 22.65% have unspecified education status.

As such, John Average only highlights one previous place of education, where he received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science.

Skills

Regarding skills, we extracted over 5,000 hard and soft skills our users were adding to their CVs. An average job hunter in the UK includes 7.9 skills on their CV, which is why John Average has 8 skills on his CV.

Since hard skills are industry-specific and vary greatly from job to job, here are the top 12 soft skills UK job seekers add to their CVs:

5 of those skills made it into John Average’s CV, right next to 3 hard skills, which were the most commonly added for his industry.

Certifications

Unfortunately, John Average has no certifications. How come? In the digital era, where valuable certificates are easy to find and not too time-consuming to get, you’d think that a lot of people use certifications to improve their qualifications.

According to our data, 80.07% of job hunters have zero certificates on their CV. For those that include certificates, the data looks like this:

• 7.58% include 1 certification.
• 4.77% have 2 certifications.
• 2.75% add 3 certifications.
• 4.90% have 4 or more certificates.

Languages

Our users added 73 unique languages across all of their CVs. The most popular language was English—added to 39.79% of CVs. Next was Hindi, featured in 14.19% of CVs. In third place, we can find Afrikaans, which was included in 7.67% of CVs.

Since most users don’t create a language section at all, John Average also didn’t add it to his CV.

CV length

Most CVs created in our builder are between 100–300 words long. Approximately 27.66% of them created a CV of this length. Extremely short CVs of under 100 words were next, created by 18.55% of our user base. Long CVs of 700+ words were crafted by 15.73% of our users.

Creation time

An average UK user created their CV in exactly 26 minutes. The only group faster than that were our Brazilian users, who make a CV in roughly 24 minutes and 13 seconds. Our Polish user base needs the most time to write a CV, taking about 31 minutes and 8 seconds per document.

Cover letter

31.41% of our UK-based users start creating their cover letters. Out of them, 67.07% downloaded their finished cover letter. These are the largest numbers from our portals, meaning that UK job hunters are the most likely to add cover letters to their CVs.

On the other hand, our French users are the least likely to do so. Only 2.32% of them downloaded a cover letter.

Results

Here are the most important points from our analysis:

• The average candidate has 6 years and 9 months of combined work experience and held 2 past jobs.
• Management roles are the most prevalent.
• Over 18% of our users have a Bachelor’s Degree, and over 10% hold a Master’s Degree.
• The average user includes 7–8 skills on their CV.
• Over 80% of our users don’t add certifications to CVs.
• Hindi is the most common non-English language.
• The average CV is between 100–300 words long and takes 26 minutes to write.
• 68.59% of UK users don’t even start writing a cover letter.

Methodology

The study is based on the analysis of over 6.5 million real professional CVs created by users of LiveCareer.co.uk—a representative group of women and men of different ages and at different stages of their professional careers. The analysed documents were created from October 30, 2023, to November 1, 2024.

How we review the content at LiveCareer

Our editorial team has reviewed this article for compliance with Livecareer’s editorial guidelines. It’s to ensure that our expert advice and recommendations are consistent across all our career guides and align with current CV and cover letter writing standards and trends. We’re trusted by over 10 million job seekers, supporting them on their way to finding their dream job. Each article is preceded by research and scrutiny to ensure our content responds to current market trends and demand.

Sources

• London Labour Market
• Immigration System Statistics - GOV
• Rising cost-of-living prompts 40% of UK workers to consider career change - International Accounting
• Quarter of the workforce moving jobs in the next six months - People Management
• How long should you stay in one job? - BBC