Fruit Picker CV Examples & Writing Guide

A one-page CV for an experienced picker with six harvest seasons in Kent apples and cherries and Herefordshire berries, plus winter work in a packhouse. The name and farms are made up. Notice how seasonal work is dated (months and years, with the number of returning seasons), and how every job gives a picking rate and a quality figure.

Most fruit picking jobs are filled by the farm's own recruitment team, a labour provider licensed by the GLAA (Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority) or, for overseas workers, a Seasonal Worker visa scheme operator, often by phone or a short online form. A CV still helps: it gets you a call back from the farms that advertise online, and larger growers keep it on file for next season. They look for four things.

• Availability for the whole season. Which months, how many days a week, whether you can start at 5 am. Growers lose money when pickers leave mid-harvest, so the dates in your header matter more than any bullet.
• Rate and quality. On piece rate, speed is your pay (the farm must still pay at least the National Minimum Wage for your hours) and quality is theirs: bruised, stalk-pulled or unripe fruit gets downgraded at the packhouse. Bins, trays, punnets or kilos per day plus a reject figure tells them what kind of picker you are.
• Physical readiness and safety. Ladders on slopes, picking trolleys in polytunnels, 18 kg picking bags, 10-hour days in 30°C tunnel heat or a 3°C packhouse. Seasons completed without injury say more than "hard worker".
• Practical fit. Transport to rural farms, whether you need on-farm (often caravan) accommodation, the right to work in the UK (or Seasonal Worker visa status if you come through that route), a second language for team communication, and whether you can also prune, thin, sort or drive a tractor out of season.

“Give us the crop, the number of bins and whether you finished the season. A picker who did nine bins a day and came back four years in a row does not need a long CV; the crew leader will call the same afternoon.”

Most people searching for a fruit picker CV have never picked commercially: students, travellers, people between jobs, overseas workers coming on the Seasonal Worker visa, and in Australia and New Zealand backpackers on working holiday visas. Growers hire first-timers every season. They need to believe you will turn up at 5 am, work outdoors all day and stay until the harvest ends. Prove those three things with anything you have done.

1. 1Header: name, mobile, email or WhatsApp, the town you will be based in, your available dates, transport and right to work. Many team leaders hire by text message, so make the mobile number the biggest thing on the page.
2. 2Career objective: two lines. The crop or region and dates you want, and the one fact that shows you can do physical work: warehouse, landscaping, construction labouring, sport, the armed forces, restaurant kitchens, an allotment or a family farm.
3. 3Work history with physical numbers: hours on your feet, weight lifted, days worked in a row, outdoor conditions. Even a Saturday job stacking shelves shows you can repeat a task for 8 hours.
4. 4Skills: early starts, working in heat, following instructions exactly, careful hands (fruit bruises), basic counting for bins and trays, any second language spoken on mixed farm teams, a driving licence.
5. 5Training you can get before you apply: a free online manual handling or farm safety course, and a Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate if you want to move into the packhouse. Do not invent a "fruit picking certificate"; none exists.
6. 6Half a page to one page, plain text, and keep a copy on your phone as a PDF to send by text, WhatsApp or email.

Eight to twelve skills, in plain words. Growers do not look for corporate skills here; they look for evidence you can pick fast and clean, handle equipment safely and fit into a team.

• Picking: hand picking by crop (top fruit, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherries), picking pattern and ladder placement, picking into punnets from table-top crops with a trolley, bag or bucket to bin transfer, filling trays and punnets to specification, working at piece rate.
• Quality: judging ripeness by colour and size, stalk handling (cherries with stalks, apples without pulling spurs), spotting defects, sorting and grading, keeping fruit out of the sun.
• Orchard and field work: thinning, propping, basic pruning, drip irrigation set-up, weeding, mulching, putting up and taking down polytunnel covers, netting work, tractor or ATV driving if you have it.
• Safety: ladder work on slopes, spray re-entry rules from the farm's safety induction, working in polytunnel heat, water and shade breaks, manual handling, illness reporting under the farm's hygiene rules.
• Team skills: early starts, 6-day weeks, keeping pace with a row team, counting your own bins or tallies, communicating in English and a second language, training newcomers.
• Packhouse skills out of season: line sorting to Class I standards, punnet and tray packing, bagging, palletising, working in cold stores, forklift or pallet truck where certificated.

The weak version repeats the job advert. The strong version gives the crop, the daily rate, the quality figure and the conditions. The numbers come from your piece-rate tallies and the packhouse reports team leaders post each week.

Seasonal work confuses standard CV advice. Gaps are normal, several farms in one year are normal, and returning to the same farm is the best thing you can show. Date each job by months and years, count the seasons, and let the off-season show as what it was.

No licence is needed to pick fruit in the UK and no certificate is required to start. A few real training items still belong on your CV because farms have to provide them under health and safety and food safety rules, and like to hire people who already have them.

• Farm health and safety induction, including spray re-entry rules. Farms must tell workers about the risks of the job, including which areas have been sprayed and when it is safe to go back in, and most repeat the briefing every season. Write "Farm safety induction, annual, current" with the year.
• Working in heat. Polytunnels can pass 30°C on summer afternoons. There is no UK heat certificate, but an employer briefing on heat, hydration and breaks is worth listing with the year.
• Harvest hygiene and food safety training on a farm audited under Red Tractor, GLOBALG.A.P. or a supermarket's own standard. Employer-provided; list it as annual.
• Ladder safety, tractor or ATV operation (Lantra runs recognised courses), forklift for packhouse work (RTITB or similar accreditation): list the year and the equipment.
• Paperwork: your right to work in the UK, which the farm or labour provider must check before you start, or your Seasonal Worker visa and placement dates if you come through that route. Do not put document numbers on the CV; write "Full right to work in the UK".
• A note on "cherry picker": searches mix up fruit picking with the cherry picker, which is a mobile elevating work platform (MEWP) used in construction and warehouses. If you have operated one with IPAF training, list it under equipment as "MEWP (cherry picker), IPAF-trained"; it is a different skill from picking cherries.

• Half a page to one page. Header with dates, transport and mobile; two-line personal statement or career objective; farms with 2 to 4 bullets each; skills; training. Nothing else.
• Plain text, no photo, no date of birth; UK employers do not expect them. Save as a PDF you can send from your phone, named Firstname-Lastname-Fruit-Picker.pdf, and bring printed copies to farm offices and labour providers.
• Terminology: in the UK the words are fruit picker, seasonal worker, harvest worker or farm worker, and the document is a fruit picker CV or fruit picking CV. In the US it is a resume. Australian and NZ growers may ask about your visa and, in Australia, regional work for a second-year visa (UK passport holders no longer need the 88 days of specified work; check the current rules). The content rules are the same everywhere.
• Keywords to mirror from online adverts: "harvest", "piece rate", "orchard", "polytunnel", "table-top", "punnets", "bins", "ladder", "outdoors", "lift up to 25 kg", "early starts", "seasonal", "6 days a week", "own transport", "caravan accommodation", "packhouse", and the crop names the farm grows.
• Larger growers and labour providers that post on job boards use screening software; the cvplex ATS checker will show which of the advert's words your page is missing.