Agricultural Technician CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is for a technician who started on an irrigated vegetable farm, moved to an agronomy firm and now runs field trials for a plant breeding station. The employers and colleges are invented. Change the crops and equipment to match your own region.

Agricultural technician jobs sit in three different worlds: research and breeding stations, agronomy services and input distributors, and production farms or estates. All three read your CV for the same underlying question: can you be trusted with data and a spray record?

• Certificates. PA1 and PA2 spraying certificates are the single most valuable line on the page for most of these roles. Name the modules you hold and add NRoSO membership if you have it.
• Volume. Plots managed, samples processed, hectares walked, irrigators maintained. Numbers show whether you have worked at trial scale or field scale.
• Data discipline. Anyone can walk a field. Managers hire the technician whose notes survive an audit. Correction rates, double entry, chain of custody and audit results are all worth a bullet.
• Equipment. Plot drills and plot combines, hydraulic soil probes, plot sprayers, ATVs, irrigators and moisture sensors. Name the machines, because training someone from zero costs a season.
• Season endurance. Drilling and harvest are 12-hour days in heat and dust. Say how many seasons you have worked and that you can do the hours.
• Driving. A C or C+E licence matters if the job hauls equipment or chemical. Even a clean car licence plus B+E trailer experience is worth stating.

• Field work: trial layout and plot mapping, plot drilling and harvest, establishment counts, growth staging, crop walking and pest identification, harvest sampling.
• Sampling and lab: soil grid and zone sampling, tissue and grain sampling, chain of custody, drying and grinding, moisture testing, instrument and reagent logs.
• Chemicals: sprayer calibration and application, tank mixing and rinsing, personal protective equipment, COSHH assessments, application record keeping, re-entry intervals.
• Irrigation: hose reels and rain guns, centre pivot mechanics and electrics, drip and micro systems, flow meters, pressure regulation, soil moisture scheduling, evapotranspiration data.
• Technology: GPS receivers, GIS shapefiles, agronomy platforms, data loggers, telemetry, Excel data cleaning and simple charts, tablet-based field apps.
• Machinery: tractors, ATVs and UTVs, plot combines, plot sprayers, hydraulic probes, trailers, and basic maintenance on all of it.
• Quality and compliance: Good Laboratory Practice, protocol adherence, deviation reporting, audit preparation, safety data sheets.
• Working conditions to state plainly: full drilling and harvest seasons, 12-hour days, heat and dust, early starts, occasional travel between trial sites.

Rules on pesticides and driving can differ between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so check the current official guidance before writing anything specific. These are the credentials that come up in adverts.

• Pesticide application certificates: to apply professional pesticides you generally need PA1 (the foundation module) plus the module for your equipment, such as PA2 for boom sprayers or PA6 for hand-held kit, from City & Guilds NPTC or Lantra. Write the modules you hold, and add NRoSO membership if you have it.
• Irrigation and water management training, for example short courses through a land-based college or an industry body: worth listing for irrigation-heavy roles.
• HGV licence: C or C+E if the role hauls equipment or chemical tanks. Note Driver CPC where it applies to you.
• Good Laboratory Practice training: expected for regulated trial work at seed, crop protection and contract research organisations.
• COSHH and pesticide safety training: employers must assess chemical risks and train the people handling them, and this is often provided in-house.
• First aid: cheap, useful on remote field sites, and a fair extra line.
• Optional but respected: the BASIS Certificate in Crop Protection. It is aimed at agronomists rather than technicians, but starting it signals where you want to go.
• Education: a Level 3 diploma or foundation degree in agriculture, or a degree in agriculture, crop science or plant science, is typical. Candidates from farming families with strong machinery and record-keeping experience do get hired without either.

Research stations and agronomy firms hire heavily for seasonal technician work, and a good share of those seasonal people are kept on. That is the normal way in.

1. 1Put farm experience in as a job. Rogueing wild oats and blackgrass, running a chaser bin, lambing, feeding livestock: give hectares, hours and machines.
2. 2Turn coursework into evidence. Name the practicals and field modules: soil science, plant pathology, weed identification, crop production, with hours if you have them.
3. 3List undergraduate research or a summer research assistant post as experience, with plot counts and what data you collected.
4. 4Get PA1 and PA2 before applying. They are affordable and they move your CV up the pile.
5. 5Say what you can drive and operate: tractor with implements, ATV, telehandler, trailer towing, 4x4 pickup.
6. 6State your season availability with dates. 'Available 1 April to 15 November, full time, including weekends during drilling and harvest' is exactly what a station manager needs to read.
7. 7Show you can record data. A line about lab notebooks, spreadsheets or barcode scanning matters more than you think, because sloppy note-takers ruin trials.

• Two pages at most. One page is fine for new graduates and seasonal applicants; senior research technicians with publications or a long protocol list can use the full two.
• Plain single-column layout, no photo, no date of birth. Seed and crop protection companies use applicant tracking software and will parse your CV before a human reads it.
• Put your spraying certificates and licence category in the contact line. They are the fastest yes on the page.
• Order: contact details, personal statement, experience, skills grouped by work area, certificates and licences, education. New graduates put education second.
• Mirror the advert's exact words: 'field trial', 'plot', 'protocol', 'chain of custody', 'grid sampling', 'variable rate', 'crop walking', 'PA1/PA2', 'GLP', 'evapotranspiration'. Use their job title too: agricultural technician, field technician, research technician and trials technician all describe similar work.
• If the job is seasonal, put your availability dates near the top. Season fit decides these hires more than experience does.
• Send a PDF named firstname-lastname-agricultural-technician-cv.pdf.

“I can teach anyone to pull a soil core. What I cannot fix is a technician whose notes do not match the plot map. Show me sample volumes, show me how you check your own data, and tell me your spraying certificates are current. That is the whole shortlist.”