12 — The Two Australian CVs: The Document That Registers You Will Not Get You Hired

Part 12 of the AMC to Australia series. Previously: ALS, BLS and the $7,870 mistake, Failed the AMC MCQ, PTE Exam Day, and AMC MCQ Exam Day

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Here are two pieces of official advice about your Australian medical CV, both current, both from bodies you cannot ignore.

Ahpra, in its standard format for curriculum vitae, wants a continuous practice history with no unexplained gaps, every position dated, each facility listed with its name, address and contact details, each role marked full-time or part-time with hours per week, plus your registration history in every country, and a signed declaration that the whole thing is true and correct as at a given date.

Queensland Health, whose CV template is the preferred format for its RMO and Registrar campaign, wants the same shape and adds that if you use your own template it must carry a verification statement, signed and dated — wet ink or electronic.

And then NSW Health's IMG Clinical Readiness Program sets a hard ceiling on the resume you upload: maximum three pages.

Three pages. For a document that is supposed to name every hospital you have worked in, with its street address and phone number, and account for every month since you graduated.

Those instructions are not in tension because someone made a mistake. They are in tension because they are describing two different documents.

Most IMGs write one. It is usually the long one, because the long one is what Ahpra demanded first, and by the time the job applications start it is already built and it feels authoritative. So a nine-page credentialing document gets uploaded into a recruitment portal, where a consultant with forty applications and one afternoon opens it, reads the first page, and finds a table of facility addresses.

This article is about building both properly: what each one is actually for, who reads it, what belongs in it, and the handful of sections that IMG CVs get wrong in the same way every year.

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The two documents

Build the compliance CV first, because it is the harder one and it is the source of truth. Then cut the selection CV out of it. Never the other way round — a selection CV expanded into a compliance CV will have holes in it, and the holes are exactly what a credentialing officer is trained to find.

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The compliance CV: what Ahpra actually asks for

Ahpra publishes a standard format for curriculum vitae, and it is careful to say what it is:

The following is a guide to what you should include in your curriculum vitae (CV) provided to Ahpra as part of your application for registration. This is not a template, you can provide the information in a format that suits you.

Not a template. A guide. Which sounds relaxed until you read what it asks for.

Personal information — name, including any previous names, contact details, and your identifying details.

Qualifications — every one, with the awarding institution, the country, and the date conferred. Your primary medical degree, any postgraduate qualification, and — for IMGs — your AMC status. If your degree needs translation, that happens before certification, not after.

Registration history — every registration you have ever held, in every country, current or lapsed, with registration numbers and dates. This is not optional and it is checked.

Clinical and procedural skills — the procedures you are competent in, and at what level of supervision.

Work and practice history — the section that does the real work. For each position, current and previous:

• Dates, month and year, start and end
• Position title
• Facility name, address and contact details, and the specific department where relevant
• City, state, country
• Responsibilities
• Full-time or part-time, and hours per week

Internship — separately identified, because Australian registration pathways care about it specifically.

Gaps in employment — every one, explained.

References — referee details.

Declaration — a statement that the CV is true and correct as at a date, signed.

Queensland Health's medical practitioner CV template mirrors this almost exactly — personal information, qualifications, practising history, medical licensing, bridging programs, clinical skills, references and other documentation — and adds one IMG-specific instruction worth reading twice: include any observership or clinical attachment completed in any Australian hospital.

That is a small line with a large implication. If you did four weeks of observership in Australia and left it off because it was unpaid and you were not making decisions, put it back. The employer asked for it by name.

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The verification statement, and why it changes the document

Queensland Health's wording:

If you're using your own version, make sure it includes a 'verification statement', and is signed and dated. For example, I verify that the information contained within this Curriculum Vitae is true and correct as at <insert date> and signed. The signature can be either electronic or a handwritten (wet) signature.

Ahpra asks for the same thing in its own words: declare that the CV is true and correct as at a date, sign it, date it.

The moment you sign it, your CV stops being a marketing document and becomes a declaration.

This is the part that most IMGs underestimate, and it has a practical consequence. Ahpra does not take your practice history on trust — IMG applications require statements of service from your previous employers, confirming employment history. Those statements get read next to your CV.

If your CV says you were a Medical Officer in the Department of Medicine from March 2021 to August 2023, and the statement of service from that hospital says Senior House Officer, Emergency, February 2021 to July 2023, someone has to reconcile the difference. Sometimes that is a phone call. Sometimes it is a request for further information that adds six weeks to an application that was otherwise finished.

So the rule for the compliance CV is not "make it impressive." It is: make it match the paperwork you are going to be asked to produce.

Get your statements of service first, if you can. Write the CV from them. Where your job title on paper is different from what you actually did, put the paper title in the title field and describe the reality in the responsibilities. Do not quietly upgrade yourself in the title line. That is the single most common way an IMG application acquires a discrepancy it then spends months explaining.

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The gap rule, and the AMC study year

Ahpra's requirement is that the practice history be continuous, with every gap explained. In practice this means every month between your graduation and today must be accounted for.

Not every year. Every month.

Most IMGs write their CV in years — "2019–2021 Medical Officer, City Hospital" — because that is how CVs are written almost everywhere else. Converted to months, that same line hides anything up to twenty-three months of unexplained time. A credentialing officer's job is to notice.

The gaps that IMGs actually have, and how to write them:

Two principles run through all of those.

First, name the gap in one plain line and move on. Do not apologise for it, do not pad it, do not invent a "self-directed learning project" to fill it. Australian panels and credentialing officers see study gaps constantly — the AMC pathway produces them — and an honestly labelled ten-month exam gap is completely unremarkable. An unlabelled ten-month hole is not.

Second, say whether you were in clinical practice. That is the fact the reader is actually extracting. A doctor who has been out of clinical practice for two years is a different risk assessment from a doctor who has been out for two months, and being upfront about it is better than making someone work it out.

There is a version of this that is worth being deliberate about. A long gap immediately before you apply is the one that draws attention — it is the same clock problem that makes life support certificates expire before anyone asks for them, and it is why the NSW IMG Clinical Readiness Program lists as an essential requirement that you have worked as a doctor overseas within the previous 3 years. Recency of clinical practice is a stated eligibility criterion, not a preference. If you can keep working while you study, your CV is materially stronger for it, and so is your eligibility.

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The selection CV: what a panel does with three minutes

Now the other document. Different reader, different job.

The reader is a consultant or a Director of Clinical Training who has a stack of applications and a shortlisting meeting on Thursday. They are not verifying you. They are sorting you. And the first pass is fast — first page, maybe ninety seconds, deciding whether to read the rest.

So the first page has to answer four questions without being asked:

1. Can you legally work? Registration status or pathway, visa or residency status.
2. Where are you up to? AMC status with dates. PGY level. English test result.
3. What have you recently done clinically? The last two or three roles, in Australian terms.
4. What are you applying for, and why this place?

AdvanceMed's Anthony Llewellyn — a former Medical Director of NSW's Health Education & Training Institute who has chaired over a thousand medical job interviews — recommends a structure for IMGs that maps onto exactly this:

1. Contact details, including Ahpra registration status
2. A two-to-three line career goal, specific to the role
3. Clinical experience, reverse chronological
4. Education and qualifications, including AMC status and bridging programs
5. Professional development
6. Teaching
7. Quality improvement and audit
8. Referees

Length: 2–4 pages. His words: "If your CV goes over slightly but remains well-organised and relevant, that's acceptable." Where a program states a page limit — the NSW ICRP three-page cap, for instance — the limit wins, and it is not a suggestion.

The career goal at the top is the piece IMGs most often skip, and it is the cheapest tailoring available. Two or three lines, rewritten for each application, naming the hospital and the pathway:

IMG doctor with four years' post-graduate experience in emergency and acute internal medicine, pursuing the standard pathway (AMC CAT MCQ passed June 2025). Seeking an RMO position at [Hospital] with a view to general medicine training, and particularly interested in [Hospital]'s regional network rotations.

That takes ninety seconds to write and it is the difference between a CV addressed to nobody and a CV addressed to them.

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Translate your job titles

A panel that cannot work out how senior you were will assume the lower answer.

"Senior House Officer" means something precise in the UK, Ireland and much of the Commonwealth. In Australia it means very little, and worse, it contains the word "senior", which makes the ambiguity actively misleading. Same with "House Officer", "Junior Resident", "Senior Resident", "Medical Officer Grade II", "Casualty Medical Officer".

The Australian ladder that panels think in:

The fix is one line per role, and it does not require you to misrepresent anything:

Senior House Officer, General Medicine (equivalent to Australian RMO / PGY2–3) City General Hospital, Colombo, Sri Lanka | Feb 2022 – Jan 2024

Put the Australian equivalent in parentheses, in plain italics, and let the panel stop guessing. Do the same for your degree if it is not obviously a primary medical qualification, and for any local exam or diploma a panel will not recognise.

One warning: translate level, not scope. If you were doing registrar-level work under a different title, say so and describe the work. If you were not, do not claim it. Referee reports exist, and in NSW the referee reports submitted for one campaign are reused across every position you apply for in it.

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Duties versus impact

This is the most-repeated CV advice in the world and it is still the thing IMG CVs most consistently miss, so here it is with the medicine put back in.

A duties CV describes the job. An impact CV describes you doing the job.

Duties:

• Managed patients on the medical ward
• Attended ward rounds
• Performed procedures
• Taught medical students

That paragraph is true of every doctor who has ever held the post. It carries no information about you.

Impact:

• Independently managed 8–10 inpatients overnight across two medical wards, escalating to the on-call registrar under a defined protocol
• Performed ~120 supervised and 60 independent procedures including lumbar puncture, ascitic tap, central line insertion and intercostal drain
• Redesigned the intern handover sheet after a near-miss review; adopted as the unit standard and still in use
• Delivered weekly bedside tutorials to final-year students for 18 months; consistently rated in the top two tutors on end-of-term feedback

Same doctor, same job. The second version tells a panel about volume, independence, escalation behaviour, procedural competence, systems thinking and teaching — the exact attributes an Australian selection panel is scoring for.

Three practical rules for rewriting your own:

Put numbers on things. Patients per shift, procedures performed, students taught, beds covered, presentations per year. Numbers are the cheapest credibility available and almost nobody uses them.

Name the Australian concepts you already practise. Escalation. Handover. Multidisciplinary team. Discharge planning. Patient-centred care. Open disclosure. You have been doing these things under other names; using the local vocabulary shows the panel you know how the system here talks about them.

Say what changed. "Initiated weekend discharge planning huddles, improving Monday bed availability" beats "participated in discharge planning" every time — not because it is grander, but because it demonstrates that you notice systems and act on them.

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The three sections IMG CVs leave out

Clinical experience is the section IMGs write well. These three are the ones that get cut for space, and they are disproportionately what separates two otherwise identical applicants.

Teaching. Bedside tutorials, medical student supervision, intern orientation, nursing education, journal club presentations, exam coaching for juniors. Australian public hospitals are teaching hospitals; a doctor who teaches is worth more to a unit than one who does not, and it is explicitly assessed in training program selection. If you have taught, it goes in its own section with dates and audience.

Quality improvement and audit. This is the section IMGs most often believe they have nothing for, and are usually wrong about. You do not need a published QI project. You need a problem you noticed, something you measured, something you changed, and — if you have it — a result. Write it in four lines: aim, method, your specific contribution, outcome. An audit of antibiotic prescribing against local guidelines in one ward over one month counts. So does a re-audit. So does a failed project honestly described.

Professional development. Courses, workshops, conferences, bridging programs, cultural safety training, and your life support certificates with issue dates and expiry dates — the expiry date matters, and it is what makes buying them too early expensive. Include Australian-context training specifically; it signals you are preparing to work here rather than just applying from here.

If any of those sections is genuinely empty right now, that is useful information about how to spend the next six months. All three are things you can build while you are still overseas.

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Put your English score where it will be read

The Medical Board's English language requirement is a registration threshold. Your CV is something else: it is the first sample of your written English that a selection panel will ever see.

Two things follow.

One — if your score is well above the minimum, say so, at the top. Not buried in a qualifications table on page four. In the header block, on one line:

PTE Academic: Overall 84 (Listening 87, Reading 82, Speaking 88, Writing 80) — Feb 2026

The minimum gets you registered. A visibly strong score reassures a panel about handover, family meetings and difficult conversations, which is what they are actually worried about. And note the date — PTE and OET results expire, so the date is doing work.

Two — the CV itself is the test. A CV with awkward phrasing, inconsistent tense, or three different date formats undercuts a score of 90 more effectively than a score of 65 ever could. Before you submit anything:

• Read it aloud. Every sentence you stumble on gets rewritten.
• Fix date formats so all of them are identical — pick Mmm YYYY and never deviate.
• Have a native or near-native English speaker read it, ideally someone who has worked in an Australian hospital.
• Check that your name, spelled and capitalised the same way, matches your passport, your Ahpra record and your AMC certificate. Mismatched names create pre-employment check problems later.

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What to leave out — and the exception

Standard Australian resume convention: no photograph, no date of birth, no marital status, no religion, no nationality, no children, no health information. Australian anti-discrimination law makes employers actively uncomfortable receiving any of it, and a photo on a resume reads as unfamiliarity with the local market.

For most IMGs this feels wrong, because in many countries a photograph and full personal details are mandatory. Here they are a mild negative.

The exception, and it is important: this rule belongs to the selection CV, not the compliance CV.

Ahpra needs your identifying details, including previous names, because it is establishing identity. Queensland Health's new-applicant identity requirements include documents showing date of birth. NSW Health's ICRP resume template explicitly asks for country of birth as a listed field.

So the answer is not "never include personal details." It is:

• Compliance CV and forms — give exactly what is asked for, precisely, including DOB and previous names.
• Selection CV uploaded to a recruitment portal — name, phone, email, Ahpra number or pathway status, working rights status, city. Nothing else personal.
• Where a template explicitly asks for a field — fill it in. The template overrides the convention.

Also leave out of the selection CV: a headshot, your full residential address (city and state is enough), referee contact details you have not asked permission for, and hobbies unless they genuinely add something. "Volunteer first-aid officer, local cricket club" is worth a line. "Reading and travelling" is not.

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Referees: the part that is decided before you apply

NSW Health is specific: you must nominate at least two referees, including a current supervisor. If you do not have a current supervisor, or have not worked for them long, give your most recent previous supervisor.

Two mechanics of the NSW campaign are worth understanding because they change how much this matters:

• Referee details are requested by email when you are first invited to interview, and your referees then complete the reference check online.
• The referee reports submitted by your two referees are used for every position you apply for during the campaign — and referees cannot be changed for second-round applications.

Read that again. In a campaign system, you are not choosing referees per job. You are choosing two people whose reports will be attached to all of your applications, and you cannot swap them out later.

The selection principles that follow — recency, relevance, diversity:

Recency. Someone who has supervised you in the last twelve months. A consultant who supervised you brilliantly in 2019 remembers less than you think.

Relevance. Someone who supervised you doing work resembling the job you want. For an ED-heavy RMO post, your ED consultant beats your professor.

Diversity. Two people who saw you in different settings say more together than two people from the same ward.

Then the part that is actually about being organised:

• Ask first, in writing, before you list anyone. A referee contacted cold is a referee who answers badly.
• Send them your CV, the job description, and a short note on what you would like emphasised. This is normal and helpful, not presumptuous.
• Check the contact details work from Australia. An overseas landline that rings out, or an institutional email that bounces, will stall a reference check. Give a mobile number with the country code and a personal email as backup.
• Warn them about timing. Reference checks in Australian campaigns arrive fast and expect a quick turnaround. A referee on annual leave with no warning is a real delay.
• Tell them your name as it appears on the application, if it differs from the name they knew you by.

On the CV itself, either list the referees in full — name, position, institution, email, mobile with country code, and your relationship to them ("Supervising Consultant, General Medicine, Feb 2022 – Jan 2024") — or write "Referees available on request" if the portal collects them separately. Never list someone who does not know they are listed.

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The mechanics nobody mentions until it fails

Uploading is where finished applications go wrong, and every rule here is published.

Queensland Health:

• All uploaded files must be PDF
• Maximum 2MB per file
• If two or more documents must go up as one file, scan them together as a single PDF within the limit
• Supporting documents must be certified — JP, commissioner of declarations, barrister, solicitor or notary public
• Translation happens before certification, so the certified copy is of the final English version, by a NAATI-approved translator
• If your surname does not match across documents, a certified marriage or change-of-name certificate is required

NSW Health JMO recruitment:

• 5MB per file, up to 25 files
• Upload your CV and tick both "Resume" and "Relevant Files"
• Other required items: evidence of working rights and residency status, Ahpra registration number and details, MBBS or equivalent (mandatory), responses to selection criteria, plus anything named in the ad

NSW ICRP: everything in PDF, resume maximum three pages, cover letter maximum two pages addressing the selection criteria, and certified copies of citizenship/PR/visa, AMC result or certificate, and English evidence, all certified in line with Ahpra policy.

Three habits that prevent most of the failures:

Name your files like a person who will be dealing with forty of them. Surname_Firstname_CV_2026.pdf. Not cv final FINAL v3 (2).pdf.

Export to PDF from your word processor — never print, photograph and re-upload. A photographed CV loses searchability and looks careless. Keep certified scans separate from your typed CV.

Check the file size before the deadline, not on it. A 6MB scan against a 2MB limit at 11pm on closing night is an entirely avoidable way to miss a campaign.

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Build order

Do it in this sequence and each step feeds the next.

Step 1 — Assemble the evidence. Statements of service, degree certificates and transcripts, registration certificates from every country, AMC result, English test result, life support certificates with expiry dates, references you already hold. Everything else is written from this pile.

Step 2 — Build the master compliance CV. Ahpra's structure, month-and-year dates, every facility with address and contact details, FTE and hours per week, every gap explained in one line, registration history complete. Add the verification statement. Sign it. Date it. This document is long and it is supposed to be.

Step 3 — Cut the selection CV out of it. Two to four pages. Career goal at the top. Reverse chronological. Older roles compressed to one line each. Impact statements, not duties. Australian equivalents for every job title. Teaching, QI and PD as their own sections.

Step 4 — Tailor per application. Rewrite the career goal, reorder the experience so the most relevant role is highest, and check the ad for a page limit or a specific template. If the employer has a template, use the employer's template.

Step 5 — Proofread as if it were the interview. Because for the first ninety seconds, it is.

Step 6 — Re-date the verification statement whenever you update the compliance CV. A verification statement dated eighteen months ago on a CV listing a job you started last month is a contradiction on its face.

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Where this sits in the timeline

Here is the honest sequencing point, and it is the same one that runs through this whole series.

A CV is a rendering of your record. It can present your record clearly, in the local idiom, and it can stop a good record from being overlooked. It cannot add a line that is not there. The line that gates everything else — the one every Australian employer's IMG checklist asks for before it asks for anything else — is a passed AMC MCQ.

Queensland Health's IMG document list names it. NSW's ICRP names it as an essential requirement. Neither of them asks how good your CV is.

So if you are reading this before you have sat the exam, the correct amount of time to spend on your CV today is about an hour: start the master compliance CV, build the evidence pile, and get your statements of service requested while your old supervisors still remember you. Then close it and go back to studying.

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And when you do pass, the CV writes itself faster than you expect — because the hard part was never the formatting. It was having a defensible, continuous, verifiable record and a result to put at the top of it.

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The checklist

Compliance CV

• Every position dated month and year, start and end, continuous from graduation
• Every gap explained in one line, stating whether you were in clinical practice
• Each facility with name, address and contact details; department where relevant
• Each role marked full-time or part-time, with hours per week
• Internship identified separately
• Any Australian observership or clinical attachment included — Queensland Health asks for it by name
• Registration history for every country, current and lapsed, with numbers and dates
• Clinical and procedural skills listed with supervision level
• Verification statement, signed and dated
• Cross-checked line by line against your statements of service

Selection CV

• 2–4 pages — or the stated limit, which wins
• Career goal at the top, rewritten for this employer
• Registration status, AMC status with dates, English score with date, working rights — all on page one
• Australian equivalent in parentheses after every overseas job title
• Impact statements with numbers, not duty lists
• Separate sections for teaching, quality improvement / audit, professional development
• Life support certificates with issue and expiry dates
• No photo, no DOB, no marital status — unless a template explicitly asks
• One date format throughout
• Read aloud, then read by someone who has worked in an Australian hospital

Referees

• At least two, including a current or most recent supervisor
• Permission asked in writing, before listing anyone
• Contact details tested from overseas — mobile with country code, backup email
• CV and job description sent to each referee
• Chosen for recency, relevance and diversity — and chosen carefully, because in a NSW campaign the same two reports go to every application

Upload

• PDF, exported not photographed
• Under the size limit — 2MB Queensland, 5MB NSW
• Certified where required; translation before certification, NAATI translator
• Name consistent across CV, passport, Ahpra and AMC certificate — or a certified change-of-name document attached
• Files named Surname_Firstname_Document_Year.pdf
• In NSW, CV ticked as both Resume and Relevant Files

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The point

Nobody tells IMGs that Australia asks for two CVs, because from the inside it does not look like two. A local graduate builds one document at internship and grows it, and the credentialing version and the application version drift apart so gradually that neither is ever consciously created.

You do not have that runway. You are producing both at once, under deadline, for a system you have not worked in.

So build them deliberately. The long one is a sworn statement — complete, continuous, boring, and matching every document a credentialing officer can pull. The short one is an argument — specific, translated into Australian terms, and rewritten for every job you actually want.

Write one document for both jobs and it will fail at both: too promotional to verify cleanly, too dense to shortlist.

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AMC Prep Pro gives you 3,000+ AMC-style questions with full explanations and clinical imaging, full-length 150-question timed mocks, a bookmark-and-review queue, and category-level analytics with a live pass prediction. Free daily practice sets on the free plan. Get the app for iOS and Android.

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Next in this series: Tailoring your CV state by state — where Queensland, NSW, Victoria and WA actually diverge, which templates are mandatory rather than "preferred", and what changes when you apply into more than one campaign at once.

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Sources

1. Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. "Standard format for curriculum vitae." — https://www.ahpra.gov.au/Registration/Applying-for-registration/Standard-Format-for-Curriculum-Vitae (guidance rather than a template; personal information including previous names; qualifications; registration history in all countries; clinical and procedural skills; work and practice history with dates, position title, facility name, address and contact details, responsibilities, full-time/part-time status and hours per week; internship listed separately; explanation of all gaps in employment; references; and a signed declaration that the CV is true and correct as at a stated date)
2. Queensland Health Careers. "RMO and Registrar application documents." — https://www.careers.health.qld.gov.au/medical-careers/resident-medical-officer-rmo-and-registrar-campaign/application-documents (Queensland Health Medical practitioner CV template as the preferred format; verification statement wording, signed and dated, electronic or wet signature; no cover letter required and, if submitted, to form part of the CV; identity document requirements for new applicants; certification by JP, commissioner of declarations, barrister, solicitor or notary public; NAATI translation before certification; PDF format and 2MB file size limit; change-of-name documentation; additional IMG documents including AMC MCQ result or AMC certificate, visa documentation and VEVO check) — last updated August 2026
3. Queensland Health. "Medical practitioner CV template (RMO)." — https://www.careers.health.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/word_doc/0031/188554/rmo-cv-template.doc (template sections covering personal information, qualifications, practising history, medical licensing, bridging programs, clinical skills, references and other documentation; continuous practising history including internship in any country with rotation detail; inclusion of observership or clinical attachment completed in any Australian hospital; explanation of all gaps in clinical practice; position detail including dates, title, responsibilities, full-time/part-time capacity and hours per week, facility name, address and contact details, department, city, state and country)
4. NSW Health. "IMG Clinical Readiness Program — Resume template and documents checklist." — https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/workforce/medical/Pages/icrp-resume-template.aspx (all documents in PDF; resume maximum three pages; listed resume fields including full name, residential address, email, mobile, country of birth, education history and employment history; essential requirements including working rights, no previous Australian medical practice, a passed AMC CAT MCQ Part 1, having worked as a doctor overseas within the previous three years, Working With Children Check and National Police Check; cover letter maximum two pages addressing the selection criteria; certified copies in line with Ahpra policy; two written references using the reference check template at interview stage)
5. NSW Health. "Junior Medical Officer — Applying for a role." — https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/jmo-apply (2027 JMO campaign with the second round opening 29 September 2026; application requirements including evidence of working rights and residency status, Ahpra registration number and details, updated resume, responses to selection criteria, MBBS or equivalent as mandatory; five-step application process; requirement to nominate at least two referees including a current or most recent previous supervisor; referee details requested at first interview invitation and reference checks completed online; referee reports reused across all positions in the campaign; pre-employment screening checks; eligibility lists accessible for up to 18 months) — current as at 16 July 2026
6. NSW Health. "JMO Recruitment Applicant User Guide." — https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/jmo/Documents/user-guide-applicant.pdf (document upload mechanics including the 5MB per file limit and up to 25 files, and ticking both Resume and Relevant Files when uploading a CV; referees not changeable for second-round applications)
7. Llewellyn, A. AdvanceMed. "Top 6 CV Mistakes IMGs Make When Applying for Training in Australia." — https://advancemed.com.au/top-6-cv-mistakes-imgs-make-when-applying-for-training-in-australia/ (recommended IMG CV structure of contact details, career goal, clinical experience, education and qualifications, professional development, teaching, quality improvement/audit and referees; 2–4 page guidance; stating English test results at the top of the CV; translating overseas titles such as Senior House Officer into Australian equivalents; replacing duty lists with impact statements; tailoring the career goal per employer; separate sections for teaching, QI and professional development; at least two referees, ideally Australian-based; prioritising Australian clinical roles from the last 2–3 years) — updated April 2026
8. Llewellyn, A. AdvanceMed. "Job References on Doctor CVs: Who To Choose & How To Include." — https://advancemed.com.au/job-references-on-doctor-cvs/ (the recency, relevancy and diversity principles for selecting referees)
9. AMC Prep Pro. — https://amcexampreparation.com/

Application requirements, file size limits, page limits, templates and campaign dates change between recruitment rounds and between states, and this article covers Queensland Health and NSW Health as the two best-documented examples rather than as national rules — Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory each run their own processes with their own templates. Verify every requirement against the current job advertisement and the employer's own application page before you submit, because the advertisement overrides any general guidance including this article. Two points here are explicitly not authoritative and are flagged where they appear: the convention against photographs, dates of birth and marital status on Australian resumes is a widely observed market norm rather than a published rule, and it is expressly overridden wherever an employer's template asks for those fields; and the description of what a selection panel prioritises on a first read is drawn from published recruitment guidance and one medical HR practitioner's account, not from any employer's scoring rubric. Nothing here is a statement of Ahpra registration requirements or a substitute for the Medical Board of Australia's published registration standards, and nothing here is legal or migration advice. AMC Prep Pro is not affiliated with the Australian Medical Council, Ahpra, the Medical Board of Australia, Queensland Health, NSW Health, or AdvanceMed.