The German Lebenslauf, explained

A German Lebenslauf is a table. Not a metaphor for one — an actual two-column list of dates on the left and facts on the right, running from the most recent entry backwards. It is read for completeness rather than for persuasion, and the persuading is done by the Anschreiben that sits in front of it. If you arrive from a UK or US hiring culture, that single difference explains almost every other one.

The order of the sections

1. Heading: "Lebenslauf". Yes, the document says what it is.
2. Persönliche Daten — name, address, phone, email, and usually date and place of birth.
3. Berufserfahrung, most recent first, with month and year on both ends.
4. Ausbildung: studies, then vocational training, then school, most recent first.
5. Weiterbildungen und Zertifikate.
6. Kenntnisse — languages with a stated level, IT skills, driving licence if the job needs one.
7. Engagement or Interessen, only if they say something.
8. Place, date, and your signature.

Two pages is the norm and the ceiling. One page is fine early in a career and reads as thin after about eight years. Three pages is unusual outside academia, where a full publication list is expected and the whole convention is different.

Gaps are noticed here

Because the document is read as a chronology, a missing stretch of months is visible in a way it is not on a CV that only lists years. The convention is not to hide it: give the period its own row and name it in one line — Elternzeit, Pflege eines Angehörigen, Weiterbildung, Neuorientierung, Arbeitssuche. A named gap is a fact. An unexplained one is a question the reader now has to ask in an interview, which is a worse use of everyone’s time.

Personal details

Date of birth is conventional. So is a full street address, because the Anschreiben is laid out as a letter and the two documents match. Nationality appears often, marital status and the number of children much less than it used to, and religion only where the employer is a church-affiliated organisation. None of it is required. The practical question is which omission a reader will notice, and in Germany, Austria and Switzerland the answer is: a missing date of birth, occasionally; a missing address, often.

How the entries are written

Each role gets its job title, the employer with its location, and two to five bullets underneath. The bullets are noun phrases far more often than the verb-first sentences an English CV uses: "Verantwortung für ein Team von sechs Mitarbeitenden" rather than "Led a team of six". Numbers still help, and for the same reason they help anywhere — they force the line to describe a result instead of a duty.

• Name the employer properly, with its legal form and location. "Siemens AG, München" not "a large engineering firm".
• Give the German equivalent of a foreign qualification in brackets where one exists, and leave the original name first.
• State language levels as A1–C2 or as Muttersprache. "Good German" means nothing to a reader who has to staff a rota.
• Keep the same font, the same margins and the same header as the Anschreiben. The set is read as one document.

Place, date, signature

The Lebenslauf ends with the place, the date, and a signature. It is a formality and it is also the one line that most obviously marks a CV as written for this market. A scanned or drawn signature is entirely normal in a PDF application; a typed name is increasingly accepted and nobody will reject you over it. Update the date when you send the application, not when you last edited the file.

If you are bringing an international CV

You do not need to start again. Four changes usually do it: add month precision to every date, add the personal-details block and the signature line, name any gaps, and move the persuasion out of the CV and into the Anschreiben. What you should not do is keep a US-style one-page resume with a profile paragraph and no addresses — it reads as incomplete rather than as concise.