Nearly everyone entering ecology has the same problem. The experience that qualifies you was unpaid, and you are not sure how to write it down without it looking like a hobby.
It is not a hobby. A season of breeding bird surveys is a season of breeding bird surveys, whoever was or was not paying for it. The difficulty is presentation, not substance.
Stop separating paid and unpaid work
The most common mistake we see is a CV with a proud Employment section containing bar work, and a small Volunteering section at the bottom holding all the ecology.
The person reading it cares about ecological experience. Put it first, under a heading like Ecological Experience, and put everything relevant in there regardless of whether it was paid.
Your other work still belongs on the CV, further down, under Other Employment. Bar and retail work says useful things about reliability and dealing with people. It just should not be the first thing an ecologist reads.
Write entries as work, not as membership
There is a real difference between these two lines.
Volunteer, County Bat Group, 2024 to present.
Bat surveyor, County Bat Group, 2024 to present. Around 30 emergence and re-entry surveys across roost types, working to the group’s survey protocol. Trained in handling under supervision.
The first tells the reader you turned up. The second tells them what you can do, roughly how much of it you have done, and how you were supervised.
Be honest about the numbers. If it was six surveys, say six. Nobody minds a small number, and everybody minds a number that turns out to be invented at interview.
Lead with skills, then evidence them
Put a short skills section near the top, and make every line something a person could plan work around.
Instead of “good species identification”, write what you can identify and to what level. Instead of “data skills”, write which software and what you did in it, whether that is QGIS, R or just competent Excel.
Then let the experience section prove each claim. A skill with no evidence behind it reads as optimism.
The things people forget to include
Some of the most useful lines on an ecology CV are the ones that feel too small to mention.
A full driving licence, and whether you have your own vehicle. Any licences you hold or are working towards. First aid, especially outdoor or remote first aid. Lone working experience. Comfort with early starts and late finishes.
Records you have submitted to a local environmental records centre or a national recording scheme. These are quietly excellent evidence, because they are verifiable and they show you finish things.
Length and format
Two pages. Every ecologist we know who hires has said the same thing, and it has not changed.
Send a PDF unless you are told otherwise, so the layout survives the journey. Name the file with your own name in it, because the person receiving it has forty others in the same folder.
Keep the design plain. This is a profession that reads reports for a living and is unmoved by columns and colour.
The covering letter is where the tailoring goes
Your CV can stay largely the same between applications. The letter should not.
Three short paragraphs is enough. Why this employer specifically, what you would bring to the work they actually do, and what you are hoping to learn next.
The specificity is the whole point. Naming the region they work in, or a service they offer that genuinely interests you, does more than any amount of enthusiasm.
One last thing
If your experience is thin, a well written CV will not hide it, and it should not try to. What a good CV does is make sure that everything you have actually done is visible and understood.
That is worth doing properly, because a surprising amount of experience gets left off by people who assumed it did not count.
