Driver CV (UK): HGV, Van and Multi-Drop, With a Worked Example

Most driver CVs get rejected before anyone reads a word about your work ethic. A transport manager at a depot in Warrington or Thurrock opens the file, scans for four things, and closes it again if they are not there: what you are licensed to drive, whether your Driver CPC is in date, what is on your licence, and whether you can start. If those four answers are buried on page two under a paragraph about being a hardworking team player, you have lost.

This is a fixable problem. A driver CV is not a creative document. It is a compliance summary with a work history attached, and once you build it that way the callbacks come quickly.

Put the licence block at the very top

Directly under your name and contact details, before any profile, put a block that answers the compliance questions. Recruiters in logistics read this first whether you put it first or not, so make it easy.

Here is a filled-in version you can copy the shape of:

Licence: UK Category C+E (Class 1), held since March 2019. Also C, C1, C1+E, B. Driver CPC: Valid to 14 November 2028. International card. 35 hours completed. Digital tacho card: Valid to June 2029. Endorsements: 3 points, SP30, June 2024. No bans. Other tickets: ADR packages and tanker (to 2027), counterbalance FLT (RTITB), Moffett. Availability: Immediate. Nights and tramping considered. Based Wigan, WN3.

Every line there is something a transport office would otherwise have to phone you to find out. Being straight about the three points is the right call: they will see it on your licence check anyway, and hiding it looks worse than a speeding conviction. According to GOV.UK's driving licence service, you generate a share code yourself and hand it to the employer along with the last eight characters of your licence number, and that code is valid for 21 days and single use. Say in the licence block that you can provide one on request.

Two things people get wrong here. First, the Driver CPC card type matters. GOV.UK's Driver CPC training guidance is explicit that if you take any National course inside your 35 hours you get a National card, and a National card does not let you drive professionally in Europe. If you hold an International card and the job involves continental work, say so in that line. Second, the same guidance sets the cycle at 35 hours of periodic training every five years, and warns that driving professionally without a valid Driver CPC carries a fine of up to £1,000. If your renewal is due in six months, write the expiry date anyway. An honest date beats a vague "CPC current".

Category B drivers: different rules, same principle

If you drive a Transit, a Luton or a 3.5 tonne box van, the Driver CPC requirement does not apply to you, because it starts above 3.5 tonnes. Your compliance block is still the thing that gets read first, it just contains different lines: licence categories and how long held, any C1 entitlement (worth flagging, because a lot of 7.5 tonne work goes to drivers who already have it), points, a DBS certificate if you deliver to schools or care settings, and whether you have your own PPE and phone.

For multi-drop and courier work, add the systems you have used. Naming the handheld and the routing software you actually worked with tells a depot manager you will not need three days of hand-holding. Write "Zebra TC series handhelds, Paragon routing, 120 to 140 drops per shift on a Manchester city centre round" rather than "experienced with delivery technology".

The UK CV conventions that still apply

Driver CVs are not exempt from the normal British rules. The National Careers Service, which is the government's own careers guidance, tells applicants to leave off age, date of birth, marital status and nationality, and to write "references available on request" rather than listing referees' contact details. No photograph. Two pages is the ceiling for most drivers, and one page is plenty if you have under five years behind the wheel.

The section order the National Careers Service recommends is contact details, a short introduction, then education and work history, with work history first once you have real experience. For drivers, slot the licence block between contact details and the introduction. That is the one deviation worth making.

Profile: before and after

The introduction should be three or four lines and should sound like a person who has driven for a living. Here is a real rewrite of the sort of profile that lands in transport office inboxes every week.

Before:

A hardworking and reliable professional driver with excellent communication skills, seeking a challenging new opportunity where I can utilise my skills and grow within a dynamic company.

After:

Class 1 driver with six years on trunk and store delivery work, most recently running nights out of a Midlands RDC on a 4 on 4 off pattern. Clean tacho record, no infringements in the last two years, ADR packages and tanker. Looking for regular tramping work within 90 minutes of Wigan.

The second one is shorter and says four hireable things: what you drive, what kind of work, that you are compliant, and what shift pattern you want. "Dynamic company" says nothing.

Work history bullets that a transport manager can price

Under each job, give the employer, the vehicle, the work type and the pattern, then two or three bullets with numbers in them. Numbers are easy to find in this trade because everything is measured.

Before:

Responsible for delivering goods to customers in a safe and timely manner while maintaining a high standard of customer service.

After:

Ran a fixed nightly trunk from Lutterworth to Newcastle and back, artic curtainsider, average 480 miles per shift. Kept on-time arrival above 96 percent across two years, measured on the depot's own tracker. Zero at-fault incidents and no drivers' hours infringements across six years, verified at each annual licence check.

Also worth a line: show that you know the rules rather than just following them. The assimilated drivers' hours rules on GOV.UK set the daily driving limit at 9 hours, extendable to 10 twice a week, with 56 hours in a week and 90 hours across any two consecutive weeks, and a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes of driving. A bullet like "planned my own routes and breaks around the 4 hour 30 minute rule with no infringements" does more for you than any adjective.

Agency work and gaps

A lot of driving CVs are a wall of agency assignments, which reads as instability if you list each one separately. Group them. Put the agency as the employer, give the date range once, then list the clients underneath as a single line: "Assignments included Culina, Gist and Wincanton, Class 1 nights and days." That turns nine entries into one and shows range instead of churn.

For a gap, put one plain line where the gap is: "March to August 2025: off the road following surgery, returned with a full medical clearance." Transport offices are used to medical gaps and licence surrenders. What they are not used to is unexplained silence, which they assume is a ban.

What the market actually looks like

The panic hiring of 2021 is over, but the demand has not gone away. The Department for Transport's road freight statistics for 2025 found that 26 percent of HGV businesses reported driver vacancies in quarter 4 2025, up from 24 percent a year earlier, and that 23 percent of those businesses had missed deliveries because a driver was not available. The most common reason firms gave for vacancies was drivers going elsewhere for better pay, cited by 42 percent.

That last figure is your negotiating position. On money, the National Careers Service puts HGV driver pay at around £27,000 for a starter and up to £47,000 for an experienced driver, with a working week of 38 to 52 hours that often includes evenings, weekends and bank holidays. Class 1 nights, tramping and ADR work sit at the upper end of that range, and the shift pattern is usually what moves the number, so ask about the pattern before you ask about the rate.

Where to send it

Apply direct where you can. Supermarket and third party logistics operators run their own driver recruitment pages and often pay for your Class 1 training if you come in on a C licence. Beyond that, the government's Find a job service on GOV.UK moved to a new DWP built platform on 30 June 2026 and carries a lot of depot level vacancies that never reach the big boards. Indeed, Totaljobs and Reed are all worth alerts. Local Facebook groups for drivers in your area are genuinely useful for agency shifts, though never send your licence details through a messaging app.

The five minute check before you send

Read your CV once with a transport manager's eyes. Can they see your licence categories in the first five seconds? Is the CPC expiry an actual date? Have you declared your points? Is your postcode area on there so they can work out your commute to the depot? Does at least one bullet per job contain a number?

If all five are yes, you have a driver CV that gets a phone call. Most of the ones sitting in that inbox do not.