What your CV has to prove changes with seniority.

A student CV is judged against other students, not against professionals. That changes what counts as strong.

A graduate CV has a shortage of work experience and a surplus of things that are not work experience. The skill is knowing which of those actually counts.

Once you have a year or two in work, you are no longer competing on potential. You are competing on what you did in your first job, and most people undersell it.

This is the stage where a CV stops being a record of jobs held and becomes an argument for the next one. Most CVs at this level never make the switch.

A senior CV has the opposite problem to a graduate CV: too much material and not enough room. Editing is the whole job.

A manager CV fails most often in one way: it describes the manager's own work and forgets the team.

A director is hired to own a function's results. The CV has to show a function that performed differently because you ran it.

An executive CV is read as a business case. Functional detail is assumed; what is being assessed is judgement, remit and results at the level of the organisation.

A C-suite CV is read by people deciding whether to hand you the company. The questions are about the enterprise, not the function.