The format is fine. The editor is the problem.
Europass is the EU's own CV standard — the format Erasmus+, most EU civil-service postings, and cross-border EURES applications expect. It's not a bad idea: one structured schema (SkillsPassport, in the official schema's own vocabulary) covering identification, work history, education, skills, and achievements, from which both a human-readable PDF and a machine-readable XML get generated.
The problem is entering the data. The official europass.europa.eu editor is a form — one role at a time, one skill at a time, one field at a time. For someone with ten or fifteen years of experience, filling it out by hand costs real hours, and most of that time goes to retyping information that already exists somewhere: an old CV, a LinkedIn profile, your own memory of what you actually did.
What we generate instead
Talk through your experience once — a voice interview, 15 to 30 minutes, no different from onboarding into Smart CV Writer for any other reason — and we build the same two outputs the real editor produces:
- Europass XML, matching the actual v3.4.1 schema (SkillsPassport → LearnerInfo → Identification/Headline/WorkExperience/Education/Skills/Achievement), ready to import straight into the official system or hand to an EU application portal directly.
- A Europass PDF rendered from the genuine Europass Word template — not a lookalike built from scratch, but the real
.docxthe European Commission's own editor produces, filled with your data and converted through the same pipeline our custom-branded-template exports already use.
Two fields the standard format cares about that a generic CV usually doesn't: CEFR language levels (A1 through C2, across five separate skill dimensions — listening, reading, spoken interaction, spoken production, writing) and an ESCO occupation code, matched live against the EU's own occupation taxonomy as you type your job title. Both are optional, both feed straight into the XML, and neither requires you to know what CEFR or ESCO mean going in.
When you actually need this
Private-sector employers, in Belgium or almost anywhere else, don't ask for Europass and mostly don't read it if you send it — a standard PDF works fine there. Europass matters specifically for EU civil-service applications, Erasmus+, and EURES cross-border postings, where it's required or strongly preferred. You don't have to choose one over the other up front: both formats generate from the same profile, so export whichever the application actually asks for.
Related guides
- Why there's no universal CV format — Europass is one of several attempts, and the only one with real institutional backing
- CV practices by country — how expectations shift once you leave your home country's hiring norms