How to write a physiotherapist CV that gets read

You have applied for a dozen posts and heard back on two. Perhaps you are a Band 5 trying to get a Band 6 MSK post and keep being told the field was strong. Perhaps you qualified overseas and cannot work out why your ten years of neuro rehab reads as nothing here. Perhaps you have been in private practice for five years and are trying to get back into the NHS, and nobody has explained that the document you are sending is not the one being scored.

Most of what follows is about making a physiotherapy CV legible to a physiotherapist. The person shortlisting is almost always a clinician — a Therapy Lead, a Band 7 running the service, a clinical specialist who has been pulled off their caseload for an afternoon. They read fast, and they are reading for a specific set of things.

Where a physio CV actually gets read — and where it doesn't

This matters more than any formatting decision.

For almost all NHS posts, you apply through NHS Jobs or TRAC with a structured application form. Your CV is often not part of it at all. What gets scored is the supporting information box, read against the person specification — the essential and desirable criteria list at the back of the job pack. Shortlisting panels work through that list criterion by criterion. If "experience of respiratory on-call" is essential and your supporting statement never uses the words "on-call", you can be the strongest applicant in the pile and still be rejected at shortlisting, because the panel is ticking boxes on a form.

So: for NHS applications, the useful move is to take the person spec, put its essential criteria in order, and write a paragraph or a sub-heading against each. Ugly, obvious, effective. Nobody is marking you on prose.

A CV proper is what you actually send to: private MSK clinics, locum and framework agencies, sports clubs and academies, care homes and community interest companies, occupational health providers, rehab units in the independent sector, universities, and most jobs outside the UK. That is where the rest of this article applies most directly — though everything about evidence below is equally true of what you put in the NHS supporting statement.

The first third of the first page

A physiotherapy recruiter is looking for four facts before anything else. Make them impossible to miss.

HCPC registration. Put your registration number on the CV — the PH prefix and the digits. Not "HCPC registered". The number, so it can be checked in thirty seconds against the public register. If you are not yet registered — a new graduate awaiting registration, or an internationally qualified physiotherapist mid-application — say exactly where you are in the process and the date you expect a decision. Vagueness here reads as a problem.

CSP membership, if you have it, with whether you hold the MCSP designation. This also tells a private employer that your professional liability insurance runs through the CSP, which they will otherwise ask about.

Your current band and job title, in NHS terms. "Band 6 Specialist Physiotherapist, Musculoskeletal Outpatients" tells a reader more in eight words than a paragraph of self-description. If you are outside the NHS, give the nearest honest equivalent and describe the caseload rather than claiming a band.

Your specialty and, if relevant, your on-call status. More on that below.

Underneath, a three- or four-line summary is fine as long as it contains facts. "Band 6 physiotherapist, four years post-qualification, MSK outpatients and spinal triage, injection therapy trained, currently respiratory on-call competent" is a summary. "A dedicated and compassionate physiotherapist with excellent communication skills" is not — every physiotherapist writes it, so it distinguishes nobody.

Rotations are the evidence. Write them out.

The single most common thing that costs physiotherapists interviews is collapsing a rotational post into one line.

"Band 5 Rotational Physiotherapist, [Trust], 2022–2024" tells the reader nothing they need. Rotations are typically four to six months, and the reader wants to know which ones, in what order, and how recently. They are matching your rotation history against the vacancy. A stroke unit post wants to know when you were last on a stroke unit. A respiratory post wants to know whether your ITU rotation was two years ago or six.

So list them:

Band 5 Rotational Physiotherapist, [Trust], Aug 2022 – Sep 2024

• Acute respiratory and critical care (6 months, Apr–Sep 2024): ITU and HDU caseload, ventilated and tracheostomised patients, manual hyperinflation, suction, NIV, early rehab and mobilisation of level 3 patients. Completed on-call competencies Jun 2024; participated in the 24/7 emergency respiratory rota.
• Stroke and neuro rehab (5 months): inpatient stroke unit and ESD, average caseload 10–12, Berg Balance Scale and 10-metre walk test as routine outcome measures, joint sessions with OT and SALT.
• MSK outpatients (5 months): own caseload of 12–14 per day, mixed spinal and peripheral, ran a group knee class.

That is longer than a line. It is also the thing the panel is reading for. If it pushes you to three pages, use three pages.

For new graduates, do the same with placements: setting, trust, duration, and what you actually carried. Name your elective. A placement in a hand therapy unit or a paediatric respiratory service is a genuine differentiator and most new grads bury it.

On-call respiratory competency: say it plainly

For any acute post, this is scanned for early and it is frequently the deciding criterion, because a service that cannot staff its emergency rota has a problem the post exists to solve.

State three things: whether you are currently competent, when you last completed or revalidated your competencies, and when you last actually worked an on-call shift. A physiotherapist who was signed off in 2019 and has done MSK ever since is in a different position from one who worked a shift last month, and the difference is not something a reader should have to infer.

If you are not on-call competent and the post requires it, say so and say what you would need — most acute trusts run a competency package and will take someone honest about needing to do it. What they will not do is discover it at week two.

Name the competencies, not the adjectives

Physiotherapy has a large vocabulary of specific, checkable skills. Use it. A reader can evaluate any of these; none of them can be evaluated in "excellent hands-on skills".

• MSK: spinal and peripheral assessment, injection therapy (say which course, and whether you inject under PGD or as a prescriber), acupuncture and dry needling with AACP membership if you hold it, vestibular assessment and the Epley manoeuvre for BPPV, orthotics and insole prescription, triage and virtual triage, FCP status — and if you hold it, say whether you completed it by the portfolio route or a taught route, and whether you are signed off at stage 1 or 2.
• Respiratory: ACBT, manual techniques, suction, NIV and CPAP set-up, tracheostomy management and weaning, sputum induction, cough assist, ISWT and 6-minute walk test, pulmonary rehab programme delivery.
• Neuro and rehab: inpatient and community stroke, ESD, spinal cord injury, MS and Parkinson's, spasticity management and botulinum toxin clinics, splinting and casting, FES, amputee rehab and prosthetic gait re-education, falls services.
• Other specialities that have their own world: pelvic health (POGP), paediatrics (APCP), hand therapy (BAHT), sport and exercise (ACPSEM, and any pitchside or emergency trauma qualification, with its expiry date).
• Prescribing: independent or supplementary prescribing is a substantial qualification. It belongs in the top third of the page, not in a list at the end.

List the outcome measures you use routinely — Oxford Knee Score, Neck Disability Index, PSFS, EQ-5D, MRC dyspnoea scale, Berg, FIM/FAM, whatever is genuinely part of your practice. It signals that you measure things, which is what audit and service evaluation criteria are actually asking about.

Name the clinical systems: SystmOne, EMIS, Cerner, Rio, Lorenzo, ICE. In private practice, Cliniko, WriteUpp, TM3 or PPS. It is a small thing, but it is a real one, and it is a line.

What physiotherapists routinely leave off

Supervision and teaching. If you have supervised students, say how many, from which university, at what stage, and whether you hold CSP APPLE accreditation as a practice placement educator. If you supervise Band 3 or 4 therapy assistants or rehab support workers, say so. Band 6 and 7 person specs almost always have a supervision criterion and it is often the weakest-evidenced part of an application.

Audit, service improvement and the non-clinical pillars. At Band 7 and above, the four pillars of advanced practice — clinical, leadership, education, research — are effectively the structure of the person spec. Most physios can evidence the clinical pillar in their sleep and leave the other three blank. Write down the audit you ran, the pathway you redesigned, the waiting list initiative, the teaching session you delivered to the MDT, the guideline you wrote. Include the outcome if you have it, even if the outcome was "no change, so we stopped doing it".

Caseload size and setting. "Managed a complex caseload" means nothing. Twelve to fourteen patients a day in a spinal triage clinic, or eight community visits a day across a rural patch, means something.

A driving licence and access to a car, for any community, domiciliary or intermediate care post. This is genuinely an essential criterion on a large number of community physiotherapy specs and people leave it off because it feels trivial.

Mandatory training currency — moving and handling, basic or immediate life support, safeguarding levels. Dates, not just the fact.

Notice period and availability. Services planning a rota want to know. Put it at the end.

If you are applying outside the NHS

Private MSK clinics read a different CV. They want to know your conversion and retention picture in plain terms — how many patients you were seeing a week, how full your diary ran, whether you built a caseload from nothing or inherited one. Insurer recognition matters: if you are recognised by Bupa, AXA Health, Vitality, Aviva or WPA, say which, because it affects how quickly you can start earning. Physio First membership, your indemnity arrangement, and whether you have a self-employed track record are all relevant in a way they never are in the NHS.

For locum and agency work, the things that get you placed fast are the compliance items: HCPC number, enhanced DBS on the update service, occupational health clearance, immunisation status, and current mandatory training. Put them in a block at the end so an agency compliance officer can tick them off without emailing you.

Length, and the advice you can ignore

The "two pages maximum" rule comes from graduate recruitment in other sectors and it is contested for clinical roles. Rotation detail, competency lists and audit work do not compress well. A three-page physiotherapy CV that lets a panel match you to the post is better than a two-page one that makes them guess. Front-load it, so that a reader who stops after page one has still seen registration, current band, specialty and on-call status.

Similarly, the standard advice about keyword-stuffing your CV to beat automated screening is largely misapplied here. NHS shortlisting is done by clinicians reading against a person spec. The thing to match is not an algorithm's keyword list, it is the essential criteria — which are published, in the job pack, in order. Matching them is not a trick; it is just doing the reading.

What to do next

Take the last post you applied for and did not hear back on. Open the job pack and find the person specification. Go down the essential criteria one at a time and mark each as evidenced, partly evidenced, or absent in what you sent. Most people find two or three that are genuinely absent — usually supervision, audit, or a specific competency they hold but never wrote down.

Then fix the source document rather than the application: expand your rotations into their component parts with dates, add your HCPC number to the header, write down the on-call dates, and list the outcome measures and systems you use. That version is what you tailor from, each time, against each spec.

If the tailoring itself is the bottleneck — reading each pack properly, working out whether you actually meet the essential criteria, and writing the supporting statement against them — jobmarket.pro is an agent that reads each advert in full, tells you where you fit and where you do not, and prepares the application from one profile it cannot invent experience into.