Motorbike Courier CV Examples & Writing Guide

Here is a full CV for a rider with about eight years on the road, working same-day routes for a courier company. The name and companies are made up. Notice how early the licence, the riding record and the daily drop count appear. That is the order a controller reads in.

Courier companies hire fast and let people go fast, because a late filing or a spoiled sample costs them a client. The person reading your CV is usually the controller or the operations manager, and they are checking whether you are insurable and whether you turn up.

• Motorcycle licence. Full A2 or A, or CBT if the firm takes riders on 125cc bikes. Put the category and the year you passed.
• Your licence record. Firms check your licence with the DVLA before they hire, and their insurers ask about points. If it is clean, say so in a number: 'no at-fault incidents in 6 years' beats 'safe rider'.
• The bike. Do you own one, and is it taxed, MOT'd and insured for hire and reward? A rider with their own 125cc or larger machine and hire-and-reward cover is worth more to a small courier firm than one who needs a company bike.
• Volume. Drops per shift and miles per day tell a controller whether you can hold a route. A number they recognise as realistic beats a big round number they do not believe.
• Availability. Nights, weekends, early morning pathology collections, bank holiday cover. Say which ones you will take.

“The first thing I look for is the licence and the record, because if you are not insurable the rest of the CV does not matter. After that I want drops per shift and on-time percentage. If a rider tells me 45 stops a day in the city centre I believe it. If they tell me 90, I know they have never actually done it.”

You do not need an HGV or other commercial licence to ride a motorcycle for work. What you do need is the right motorcycle licence for your bike and, if you use your own, insurance that covers hire and reward. Which of CBT, A1, A2 or A you can hold depends on your age and the bike, so check GOV.UK before you write anything down.

Extra training separates you from every other rider in the stack. Medical courier work almost always wants confidentiality and data protection training and infection control awareness. Legal courier work wants you to understand filing deadlines and chain of custody. Pharmacy runs may want a signature and ID check procedure. Name the training exactly as the course names it, and never invent a certificate you do not hold.

Three or four lines at the top, no more. Lead with years riding, the licence, the type of work and one number. If you have under a year of paid courier work, use a career objective instead and put your riding record and availability in it.

Most courier CVs say the same four things: delivered parcels, followed routes, provided customer service, maintained vehicle. Those tell a controller nothing. Put a count, a time window or a record on every line.

Split the list so a controller can scan it. Riding and route skills first, then the paperwork and apps, then the customer-facing part.

• Riding and route: defensive riding, road positioning, safe filtering, knowledge of the city's streets, route sequencing, timed multi-drop runs, night and wet-weather riding
• Freight handling: sealed pouches, cold-chain packs and temperature logs, fragile and high-value items, chain of custody, signature and photo ID checks
• Apps and admin: proof of delivery scanning (Onfleet, Circuit, Tookan), radio and messaging with the controller, mileage and fuel logs, run sheets, daily bike checks
• Bike care: chain and sprocket service, brake pads, tyre pressure and wear checks, oil changes, battery and lighting checks, roadside puncture repair
• People skills: post room and security desk protocol, calm handling of a late or wrong delivery, clear phone updates to the controller, working alone all day without supervision

Skip generic lines like 'team player' and 'hard working'. A courier firm is buying reliability, and reliability shows up as attendance, on-time percentage and a clean record, not adjectives.

Plenty of riders get their first courier job with no delivery history at all. What a small firm wants to know is that you are licensed, insurable, available and that you will not disappear after two weeks.

1. 1Put the licence line first: category (CBT, A2 or A), the year, and whether your licence is clean.
2. 2Add your riding history even if it was unpaid: years riding, engine size, roughly how many miles a year, any advanced course.
3. 3List any job where you were on your own and had to be somewhere on time: warehouse picking, food delivery by car, paper rounds, valet work, shelf-stacking shifts.
4. 4Show you know the area. Name the neighbourhoods, the hospitals or the business districts you can ride without a map.
5. 5State your availability plainly. Early pathology runs, nights, weekends and bank holiday cover are exactly the shifts firms struggle to fill.
6. 6Say what equipment you have: bike and engine size, helmet, all-weather gear, top box, phone mount, insulated bag.

One page, plain layout, no photo, no graphics. Many courier firms run applications through an applicant tracking system that reads plain text, and a two-column design with icons can come out scrambled. Save as PDF unless the advert asks for a Word file.

• Put your licence category in the top block, not buried at the bottom. Some systems screen on that line alone.
• Mirror the advert's own words: 'same-day', 'urgent', 'last mile', 'multi-drop', 'route density', 'proof of delivery', 'chain of custody', 'clean licence', 'hire and reward'.
• If the advert says medical courier, use 'pathology samples', 'UN3373', 'cold chain' and 'confidentiality'. If it says legal courier, use 'court documents', 'process serving' if you have actually done it, and 'time-sensitive documents'.
• Write dates as month and year, and do not leave unexplained gaps. Gig work counts as work; name the platform and the period.
• Give a phone number you answer. Controllers call, they do not email.

One last check before you send it: read your CV as if you were the controller covering a 6am hospital run tomorrow. If you cannot tell from the first six lines whether this rider is licensed, insurable and available, rewrite the top.