Recruiters spend about 30 seconds on the first read of a CV, according to a 2026 review of UK hiring data. Roughly 80% of CVs don’t survive that first look. Only 11% of applicants get judged suitable for the role they actually applied to. Forget the old “you get six seconds” line every careers site still repeats — the real number is longer, and the odds are still worse than most people assume.
If you’re applying to BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Dstl, QinetiQ, or a NATS trainee controller scheme this year, generic CV advice doesn’t map cleanly onto what you’re actually up against. Each of these runs its own process, with its own rules, and most of them look nothing like what a university careers service will tell you.

Software reads it before a person does

Let’s get this clear to you, At large employers, an applicant tracking system reads your CV before a recruiter does. Roughly seven in ten large UK organisations now run graduate applications through one. It checks your CV against the job description for matching skills, tools and qualifications, and it asks knockout questions up front: right to work, minimum degree classification, security clearance eligibility. Get one of those wrong and the system removes you automatically, whatever the rest of your CV says.
This matters more in aerospace and defence than in most sectors, because the knockout questions aren’t generic. QinetiQ states plainly that its early careers roles require SC clearance as a minimum, and that a student visa doesn’t meet the legal threshold for those roles. Dstl goes further: its graduate programme requires UK nationality and five years of continuous UK residency, rising to ten years for roles needing Developed Vetting. If you don’t clear that bar, no amount of CV polish gets you through. Check eligibility before you spend an evening perfecting formatting nobody’s going to see.

Not every company wants the same document

The “one CV, tailor the top third” advice assumes every employer even wants a CV. Some Rolls-Royce graduate schemes don’t — candidates have reported going straight into an application form and online reasoning tests with no CV upload anywhere in the process. Before you spend a weekend rewriting your CV for a specific scheme, check what the application actually asks for. A beautifully tailored document nobody requested just wastes the one resource you don’t get back before a deadline.

BAE Systems runs a version of the opposite problem. Its graduate scheme allows one application per calendar year. Submit a rushed version “to see how it goes” and you’ve used your shot until next year’s cycle opens. Treat your first BAE application as the only one you get, because for twelve months, it is.

Dstl does something almost nobody else in the sector does: blind sifting. Names, universities and grades are stripped out before anyone assesses the application on merit. A first-class degree from a Russell Group university buys you nothing extra at that stage — what you actually wrote about your projects and your reasoning is the entire signal. It’s the one process on this list where a state-school engineering student with a strong personal project genuinely competes level with someone from a name-brand university, at least until interview.

NATS runs differently again. Candidate accounts describe an early CV and academic-details submission, but from there the process is almost entirely psychometric: numerical and verbal reasoning, computer-based simulations, personality profiling, then an assessment centre. A sharp CV gets you into the testing pipeline. It does not get you through it. If ATC is genuinely the goal, prep time is better spent on the aptitude tests than on a fourth CV draft.
If you’re still at A-levels and eyeing an apprenticeship route instead — BAE’s Aircraft Maintenance Technician programme, for instance — the weighting shifts again. These applications lean on the form and the assessment day far more than a full CV, so the same over-polishing instinct is largely wasted effort here too.

Building a CV when you have no industry experience yet

Almost nobody applying to a graduate scheme at 20 or 21 has done the job before. That’s expected. The gap that actually costs people interviews isn’t missing experience — it’s vague description of the experience they do have.
“Worked on a university engineering project” tells a recruiter nothing. “Designed and 3D-printed a load-bearing bracket for a four-person Formula Student suspension sub-team, cutting part weight by 22% against the aluminium original” tells them what you did, which tools you used, and what changed because of it. Same project, same person, completely different signal. The pattern holds for a CanSat build, a rocketry society launch, a personal 3D-printing project, a dissertation. Name the tool, name the scale, name the outcome.

For engineering applications specifically, the tools you list matter almost as much as the projects themselves, because that’s what the ATS is scanning for. SolidWorks, CATIA, Fusion 360, MATLAB/Simulink and ANSYS should appear against real projects, not as a floating skills list at the bottom nobody reads. For anyone applying into defence-adjacent roles, a basic familiarity with relevant standards signals you understand the industry rather than treating it as “engineering, but with planes.”
None of this needs an internship you don’t have. It needs specificity about the work you’ve already done.

Different pillars, different filters

Heading toward engineering graduate schemes, the CV and the ATS behind it are doing most of the early work — specificity and eligibility checks matter most. Going for NATS or a pilot cadet route, the CV gets you through the door and then almost stops mattering, so prep time is better spent on aptitude tests and the assessment centre. Aiming at the space sector, expect a mix of both: UK Space Agency and Catapult-adjacent roles increasingly screen like the primes, while smaller NewSpace startups still read applications by hand and respond to a well-argued cover letter more than a keyword-stuffed CV.

Check what each employer actually asks for before you build anything. That single step saves more wasted effort than any formatting trick.