Architecture is the rare field where a CV travels with a portfolio, and candidates routinely confuse the two. The text CV carries your record and must stay readable and machine-parseable. The portfolio carries your work. Keep them as separate documents doing separate jobs, and both get stronger.

Keep the CV as clean text

A practice screening applications wants to find your qualification, software proficiency, and project history quickly. Resist the temptation to make the CV itself a design piece. A single-column, restrained layout parses correctly and respects the reader’s time. The portfolio is where your visual judgement is assessed, not the CV.

State the practical facts a studio needs to place you.

  • Registration or licensure status, and the jurisdiction, since it governs what you can sign off.
  • Software proficiency: name the tools honestly, from BIM and CAD packages to rendering and fabrication software.
  • Project involvement: your role, the stage you worked on, the scale, and the studio, without claiming a whole building you drew one detail of.
  • Education and any competition results, which practices weigh early in a career.

Let the portfolio carry the images

Send the portfolio as a separate, well-compressed PDF, and reference it once on the CV with a link or a note. Curate hard: a focused set of your strongest projects beats an exhaustive archive. For each project, a short caption stating your specific contribution matters as much as the drawings, because a studio needs to know what was yours.

Make the two documents agree

The projects named in the portfolio should match those on the CV, in the same words, so a reviewer moving between them is never confused. Keep file names clear and keep the portfolio’s total size sensible, since an oversized file may never be opened. The CV gets you read, the portfolio gets you remembered, and consistency between them is what makes a studio trust both.

To build the text document cleanly, use the CV maker with the modern templates or minimalist templates, and confirm it parses with the ATS checker.