Barista CV Example
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In specialty coffee, a barista's CV is read on technical knowledge before years: dialling in grind and extraction, manual brewing, milk steaming. Then speed at peak times and how you are with customers — a café sells the whole experience, not only the cup.
Copy-ready professional summary
Copy it, then swap the numbers and details for your own.
Barista with three years in specialty coffee shops, making 250+ drinks a shift to a consistent standard. Dial in grind and recipe daily, skilled in manual brewing and latte art, and hold the SCA Barista Skills certificate.
Skills employers look for
- Espresso and grind calibration
- Manual brewing — V60 and Chemex
- Milk steaming and latte art
- Recipe and extraction dialling-in
- Daily equipment cleaning and care
- POS and customer service
Ready-made experience bullets
Replace anything in brackets with your own details, and keep the numbers — they're what sets your CV apart.
- Made 250+ drinks a shift while keeping service under four minutes at peak.
- Dialled in grind and recipe daily for each new crop and documented it for the team.
- Trained five new baristas on preparation, latte art and quality standards.
- Raised filter coffee sales by 20% in a season by recommending coffees to customers' tastes.
Education
High school diploma — [School], year of graduation.
ATS keywords
Include these terms exactly as written — applicant tracking systems match on literal text.
- barista
- specialty coffee
- espresso
- latte art
- SCA
- V60
Tips specific to this role
Technical knowledge by name
Espresso, V60, Chemex, AeroPress, grind and extraction ratio — specialty cafés search for these words literally.
Numbers describe the café
Drinks per shift and service time. A café doing fifty cups a day is not one doing five hundred.
Certificates and competitions
SCA certificates and barista or latte art competitions — list them even without a win. They show you care about the craft.
Licences and certificates employers ask for
Name in full any you hold, with the number where there is one — many postings screen on these.
- Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) certificates — Barista Skills at its levels, and Brewing for manual methods.
- Health certificate from the Balady platform — required to work in cafés.
- Food safety course — asked for by some chains.
- Barista or latte art competitions — with your placing, if any.
Mistakes specific to this role's CV
- "I love coffee" instead of what you know about it. Passion is proven by knowledge: grind, extraction, origins.
- Leaving out speed and volume. Cup quality matters, but a café needs someone who keeps it at peak.
- Not stating the health certificate — a legal requirement whose absence delays hiring.
- Ignoring cleaning and machine care — daily cleaning is part of the job and is asked about.
- Forgetting a link to your work. An account showing your latte art or competitions counts in your favour.
Questions that come up in this role's interviews
Prepare an example from your own work for each — a generic answer is what every other applicant gives.
The espresso runs fast and tastes sour. What do you do?
It's under-extracted: grind finer or raise the dose, and re-measure by time and weight until it's back in recipe. Quoting the numbers — dose, yield, time — proves you know.
A customer says their coffee isn't as usual. How do you handle it?
Apologise, offer to remake it at once, and ask what changed so you can check the grind or the milk. A customer who comes back with feedback is engaged, not difficult.
How do you brew a V60?
Give the ratio, water temperature, grind size, pour stages and total time — your own numbers — then how you adjust for the coffee.
It's slammed and orders are piling up. What do you do?
Sequence orders, batch similar drinks, coordinate with the colleague on the till, and never skip a step that hurts quality — and reassure waiting customers.
Where this job leads
From barista to senior barista or trainer, then shift supervisor and café manager. Specialist paths: roasting, cupping and grading (Q Grader), and training for suppliers. Specialty coffee in Saudi Arabia is one of the fastest-growing markets, and combining the craft with management leads quickly to running a branch or opening your own.