What goes in a yacht CV? Format and template rules

Almost everything a careers adviser told you about CVs is wrong for yachting. A yacht CV must carry a photograph, your date of birth, nationality, visa status, smoker status and a disclosure of visible tattoos — every one of which would be a discrimination risk on a land CV, and several of which a UK or Australian employer would refuse to look at.

That is not an oversight. Crew live aboard. A captain is hiring a housemate as much as an employee, and is scanning for four things: can I legally put you on this boat, do you have the tickets, have you stayed anywhere longer than five minutes, and do I want to share a small metal box with you for six months.

The format below exists to answer those four questions in the order they get asked.

How long you actually get

Under 30 seconds on a first screen is the widely quoted figure, and one source puts the keep-reading decision at around six seconds. Crew agents review dozens of profiles a day.

The eye moves roughly in this order: photo, name and target position, certifications, most recent vessel and role, then location, availability and visa status. Everything else only if those passed.

That order is the whole argument for the structure. All of it belongs on page one.

The canonical section order

Sources vary slightly, but this sequence is safe for every department and matches what agencies re-format towards anyway:

1. Name and target position as the header, photo in a top corner
2. Contact block — email, phone with international dialling code, WhatsApp, current location, availability
3. Personal details — the block below
4. Profile — six sentences maximum
5. Certifications — maritime tickets first, highest first, every one with issue and expiry dates
6. Yachting experience — reverse chronological, daywork included but labelled as daywork
7. Other / land-based experience — kept separate from yachting experience
8. Education — highest level and year only, no school exam results
9. Interests — genuinely load-bearing here, not filler
10. References — three named, most recent first, full contact details

Green crew delete section six entirely if there is no daywork to put in it. An empty heading advertises the gap.

The personal details block, field by field

This is the section with no land-CV equivalent and the one people most often leave out. Every field is there because a captain needs it to make a decision.

Field	Why it exists
Date of birth	Standard in yachting; crew age balance is a real consideration
Nationality and passports	Determines what work is legal where
Visas with expiry	B1/B2 for the US circuit, Schengen for the Med. Often the deciding field
Current location	Captains fly people in — location sets cost and speed
Availability	"Available now" and "available in six weeks" are different candidates
Smoker status	Many yachts are non-smoking. Disclose plainly
Visible tattoos	"Visible" means visible in a polo shirt and shorts, not just face and hands
ENG1 medical	Legally required to work. State status and expiry
Languages	Only ones you speak confidently, with an honest level
Driving licence	Include if full; omit if provisional or none
Marital status	Optional. Worth including if you are half of a crew couple, since couples are actively recruited

A compact health line does a lot of work: Health: Excellent · Non-smoker · No visible tattoos.

State your right to work as a plain fact and stop there — South African passport · Schengen visitor visa · no EU work rights currently. Don't talk yourself into what that permits. A crew agent or immigration adviser makes that call, and being wrong costs a ban rather than an interview.

If you are in transit, say so. It is common and perfectly presentable:

Location:  Cape Town, South Africa — relocating to Antibes [Month YY]
Available: On arrival, [Month YY]

Claiming Antibes while sitting in Cape Town gets you shortlisted, then burned.

The vessel entry format

Recruiters parse this at a glance, so give it to them in the shape they expect:

Mar 23 – Nov 24    M/Y SERENITY — 62m Feadship, private/charter
                   Bosun
                   [2–4 lines: scope, standards, achievements]

Length in metres is universal — feet is the US convention, metres is safer internationally. Builder and gross tonnage read as more senior and are expected on larger-yacht CVs. Bold the vessel names; a captain's eye goes straight there. Name the boat unless an NDA forbids it, because anonymising is not a yachting norm.

Dates in month and year, always. Years-only formatting reads as concealment, and unexplained gaps are one of the most-cited rejection reasons. Account for every gap — travel, study, illness, a season out — honestly and briefly.

Private, charter or dual is not optional detail. Charter experience signals turnaround speed and performance under pressure; private signals discretion and stability. The reader is matching you to a programme.

Label temporary work as temporary. Seasonal, rotational, relief, delivery and daywork are all respectable and expected to be short. The damage comes from a permanent job that lasted three months sitting there unexplained.

Then write standards, not tasks:

• Weak: "Responsible for housekeeping."
• Strong: "Maintained five-star interior standards across six guest cabins on a 70m private yacht during owner trips and back-to-back charters."

Metres, guests, crew, cabins, charters, days of daywork. Numbers are what make a claim checkable, and therefore credible. Captains specifically name "hardworking", "easygoing" and "attention to detail" as turn-offs — you cannot assert a trait, only evidence it.

Two pages, hard

Two pages maximum, one if you are green. Going over is a listed rejection reason in its own right. Dockwalk is stricter still and says one page for everyone.

The practical consequence: page one must carry the photo, contact and personal details, certifications, and at least your most recent role. Older roles are context, not persuasion.

What must never appear

• Passport numbers. Nationality and visa status, yes. The number, never
• Your full residential address. A city or region is the norm
• Expired certificates. Remove them rather than listing them. A missing expiry date makes a recruiter second-guess the whole list
• "References available on request." Most agency sources explicitly forbid it. Around 87% of captains check references, and many cold-call boats you didn't list. Speed of verification is a hiring advantage, so name three referees with live email and phone — captains and heads of department, never fellow crew, never family
• Salary history, religious beliefs, and "Curriculum Vitae" used as a document title
• Every job since you were sixteen, and scattered one-day dayworks listed individually. Aggregate those instead

The document itself

Single column, generous white space, bullets over paragraphs, one font throughout. Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Verdana, Garamond or Cambria; 11pt is a good default and nothing goes under 10pt. No tables, text boxes, colour blocks or nautical borders — boats print CVs on mono printers over satellite internet, and boxed layouts scramble when an agency re-formats yours onto its own letterhead.

Keep the photo under about 250KB. Send a PDF to boats, and keep an editable Word version for agencies. Name the file Firstname_Lastname_Position_CV.pdf, not CV_final_v3.pdf — it lands in a downloads folder among fifty others.

Then proofread it twice. In one captains' survey, spelling and grammar alone accounted for around 42% of rejections, and you cannot claim attention to detail in a document with a typo in it.

If you would rather have the structure enforced for you than rebuild it from a blank page, superyachtcvs.com builds the document to this format and flags the fields you have left out. Either way, the format above is the one the industry reads.