Business development CV example and writing guide

Use a clean, professional format with clear headings and enough white space to scan comfortably. Aim for two pages unless you are at the start of your career and can present your relevant evidence on one. Arrange the main sections in this order: contact details, personal statement, skills, employment history, education and further training, followed by relevant extras. List employment in reverse-chronological order.

Keep the personal statement concise. It should introduce your business development expertise, a significant achievement and the kind of opportunity you are pursuing. In the experience section, give the most space to recent, relevant roles. Start bullets with direct action verbs and connect your work to a result. Numbers can make the scale clearer, but use only figures that you can explain and defend.

Choose skills that appear in the vacancy and that your experience demonstrates. Put education after experience once your employment record is the stronger selling point; a graduate or career changer may place it earlier. Further training belongs beside education or in its own short section. Extras earn their space when they add evidence, such as another language used with clients or volunteering that involved partnerships.

Each bullet needs a clear action, enough context to show its scale and an outcome the reader can assess. A useful pattern is: action verb + commercial task or problem + scope + result. For example: "Converted 18 of 64 qualified prospects into annual contracts worth £286,000." That sentence tells the reader what happened, the size of the opportunity and the value created.

Business development work can include prospecting, closing opportunities, negotiating prices, developing customer relationships, analysing markets, forecasting targets, proposing campaigns and presenting reports. Select only the activities that match your actual work. Then show how well you performed them. Revenue, contract value, conversion rate, pipeline size, retention, meeting volume, sales-cycle time and forecast accuracy can all provide useful context when the figures are genuine.

The improved versions do not simply add numbers. They specify the action and connect it to an observable business result. If revenue was shared across a team, say so: "Contributed to a five-person team that closed £1.2m in new contracts" is more credible than claiming the whole figure personally. If an opportunity has not yet closed, describe the pipeline created rather than treating potential value as booked income.

Useful opening verbs include won, converted, negotiated, secured, prospected, qualified, expanded, retained, presented, forecast, analysed, launched and trained. Vary them because the work varied, not for decoration. Keep each bullet to one or two lines where possible, and place the strongest result first under each role.

There is no single specified qualification route for becoming a business development manager in the UK. That makes the evidence around your education important: present what you studied, then connect relevant modules, projects or activities to the vacancy without implying that the qualification is universally required.

A business-focused degree, including business studies, finance or marketing, can be particularly relevant. List the degree, institution and completion dates, followed by one or two details only when they strengthen your application. A dissertation involving market analysis, a commercial group project or experience presenting recommendations may be worth mentioning if it is accurate. A degree in another field, such as law, healthcare or education, may support business development opportunities in the corresponding sector. Explain that connection through specific knowledge rather than expecting the degree title to speak for itself.

Many business development managers progress from sales, account management or marketing. If that is your route, give employment results more space than education. Larger organisations may also recruit for these roles through graduate schemes, so an early-career applicant can foreground relevant academic work, placements and customer-facing experience when applying through that route.

No named certification is supported by the available grounding for this role, so avoid adding one merely to make the CV look fuller. Include genuine further training with its exact title, provider and completion date when it relates directly to the vacancy. Keep expired or unrelated courses off the main page unless an application specifically asks for them.