How To Write Experience Section Of Resume

Always Include Skills Used Action Taken And The Results

Explain what you did and also why it’s important.

Heres a Standout Example From Bambot

Generated $600,000+ in pipeline over two monthsthrough 350+ cold calls a week and 15+ email campaigns to about 2500 prospects

You can also use any of the two combinations:

1. Results Challenge Action

An example from Bambot:

Managed governancedocument to log status updates of 25+ projects spanning 5 departmentsby collaborating with 13 project leaders

2. Action Verb Skill Results

From Alissa Carpenter, Owner of Everythings Not OK and Thats OK:

Designed andimplementedkey account strategies with retailers that resulted in anaverage 6% incremental year-over-year sales increase, and reduced the marketingbudget by 13%

Work Experience On A Resume: What To Avoid

Always assume that your reader in this case, the hiring manager doesnt need anything explained. You also have very little room to ramble on your resume.

Free up some space by not including:

• What the organization does: your resume is about you. The hiring manager doesnt need to hear about the company.
• The basic requirements of your position: this is implied in your job title and will shine through your result-focused bullet points.
• Filler words: For the most part, save space by cutting out words like I and the.
• Anything irrelevant: If you have smaller responsibilities in a position that do not relate to the new job, leave them out. Every bullet point and every word takes up precious real estate on your resume – make them count.

If you are a recent graduate with little or no work experience, you can consider adding your GPAor cum laudeon your resume. As you acquire work experience over the years, you should replace your GPA or cum laude with relevant work experience.

Resume Experience Section Examples

Here are two examples of how to write resume experience sections.

Sample One: This is for an entry-level job candidate. Here, instead of using the heading Professional Experience, one can use the broader caption Experience Highlights which allows the inclusion of a description of recent college training:

Experience Highlights

University of Washington, Seattle, WAStudent ~ Environmental Science Successfully completed comprehensive course of study in environmental science, laying solid groundwork for career in environmental restoration. Key coursework included: Environmental Biology, Geology and Soils, Air Pollution Meteorology, Waste Treatment Technology, and Ecology. Internships:

• Acme Environmental Consulting : Honed expertise in soil sampling, documentation, and client relations during internship with established environmental consulting firm.
• Hamilton Mine Rehabilitation Project : Under the direction of faculty advisor Dr. Sarah Rose, participated in $1.4 million reclamation project to reclaim mercury-contaminated mining field.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park Service, CaliforniaPark Guide / Trail Laborer Provided nature enrichment workshops and led park tours for park visitors ensured timely maintenance of trails and park facilities.

• Rehired based on proven teamwork, work ethic, and customer service excellence.
• Played key role in restoring 18-mile wilderness trail destroyed during wildfires.

Professional Experience

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List Your Experience By Starting With Your Most Recent Position

The most commonly used style for resume experience is reverse-chronological order. This system is the best for your resume because it’s easier for your potential employer to understand what position you held most recently. In this style, you can list your current or most recent employment experience first, followed by other relevant roles you held.

Grammar Tips For Listing Job History On A Resume

Do you write sentences? Phrases? Declarations? Writing resumes for first job? Here are some nitty-gritty grammar rules for writing your work experience bullet points.

• Write in phrases, often beginning with a strong verb. No need to write I to start off the sentence that is implied and work experience in a CV is often conveyed in the third person as this is more professional.
• Tense: If you are still at your current position completing the work described, use present tense. For past positions or completed projects, choose past tense.
• Dont be afraid to break out the thesaurus especially for synonyms of lead, managed and trained but stick to words youd use yourself. No need to ace the SAT verbal section.

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How To Structure The Work Experience Section In Your Resume

After you’ve determined your most important experiences, list them on your resume in an easy-to-read format. Include the employer’s name, your job title, years of experience, and a few bullet points highlighting your most significant, relevant accomplishments. When listing your duties and achievements, it’s important you use active verbs. These active verbs help you focus on how you accomplished your tasks. Try to choose active verbs that fit your industry and can serve as synonyms for experience.

Here is a step-by-step guide to including professional experience on your resume using experience synonyms:

How To Write A Resume Profile Or Summary Statement

A resume summary or career prole is a brief statement at the top of your resume. If you are a career changer or have many years of experience, craft a powerful summary to highlight your accomplishments and skills. Show the employer, at a glance, why youre qualied for the job!

Resume Prole Guidelines

General guidelines to keep in mind:

• Keep your prole short. Two to ve phrases written in a bulleted form or brief paragraph will do. Think of the summary as a snapshot of your skills, accomplishments, and knowledge.
• Label your prole professionally: Summary of Qualications, Career Prole, Career Highlights, Professional Summary, or just Summary or Prole.
• Place your prole section at the top of your resume page, above your work history, so that the employer can see it when they rst review your resume.

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Example Of Work Experience For A Business Manager

This example uses both paragraphs and bullet points. The paragraph talks about over-arching achievements, while the bullet points highlight specific accomplishments. It’s a good balance of text and key points that is easy to visually scan for keywords and value.

The numbers in this example jump out and quantify how the candidate was able to provide value, promote sales growth, and earn recognition among a competitive talent pool.

Describe Your Educational Background

As a no-experience job seeker, your educational background is likely your strongest job qualification . This is especially true if youre writing a college freshman resume or have recently graduated.

One approach to highlight this background is to describe your relevant coursework first, like this:

You also need a resume education section, regardless if you want to mention your relevant classwork. And because youre applying for your first time job, its okay to make this section longer to fit your academic experiences.

Expand your education section by mentioning any student committees you were part of, and any scholarships, awards, or honors you were awarded. Additionally, include your GPA on your resume to further emphasize your work ethic and potential.

These details are helpful for recruiters and hiring managers, and give them another way to assess your resume other than work experience.

Heres an example of a smaller resume education section taken from a no-experience resume:

Graduate Studies

M.S. in Computer Science

California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CaliforniaB.S. in Electrical Engineering

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Writing The Experience Section

List the companies you worked for, dates of employment, the positions you held, and brief descriptions of your work responsibilities, enriched with keywords and enhanced with bulleted lists of quantifiable achievements.

This work history is typically presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with your current job and working back in time. Internships, summer jobs, and temporary jobs, in addition to permanent positions, can all be included in this part of your resume.

You do not have to include every job that you have held, especially if you have several years of experience or have worked in unrelated fields. Entry-level employees, who do not have a lot of on-the-job experience, should include every job possible while emphasizing the skills that match the job listing.

But once you have worked for more than 10 years, you may find that some of your earlier jobs are less relevant to your career. You can leave those positions off, or group together earlier experience in a very truncated format at the end of your resume. Here are two examples of how early jobs can be listed on your resume:

• Additional experience includes retail sales jobs at Barry’s Books , Cindy’s Clothing Store , and waitressing at Muffins and More .
• Additional experience includes early roles at ABC Company and XYZ company.

Mention Your Job Location

You also should include the location of your previous company. You do not have to provide the full address. Just mentioning the city and the state is sufficient. If any of your past work experience was work from home, you can either mention your current location or simply write remote work in the job location part.

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Use Strong Action Verbs

When you are writing your resume, you want the words you use to engage the person who is reading it.

Chances are that the hiring manager reading your resume will read hundreds of other resumes that all contain similar words, verbs, and phrases.

When choosing which words to use in your resume, it is important to remember that you donât want to tell the employer why you are a great candidate.

Instead, you want to use the words to show the employer why you are the best candidate.

This is where strong action verbs come in.

In your job descriptions, rather than saying something boring like âmanaged a staff of 50+ membersâ â instead use a stronger action verb such as âdelegatedâ or âdirected.â

Here are a couple quick tips for using strong action verbs on your resume:

Previous Work Experience Examples

Now that you know the basics of how to write the work history section of your resume, lets look at some good employment history samples from real resumes.

I invited a couple of experts to share their resume work history examples for this section.

Ill share two resume work experience examples from them, and then Ill include a very simple/plain example that Ive used in the past with a lot of success.

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How Do I Add Experience To My Resume: What To Include

In most cases, choosing which jobs to include on your resume should depend on your work history and the type of job youre applying for. In general, work in a backward chronological order starting with your most recent position at the top of the page and include the last 10-15 years of employment history. The backward chronological order works best for most job seekers.

If you have a scattered work history, dont stress. Job hopping is both more common and more widely accepted today, especially among the younger workforce. Including short part-time stints and side projects is good if those professional experiences directly relate to the job or feature skills that overlap with the position. Be prepared to answer questions about your career choices while considering work experience in cv, have a confident answer about your career path, and be forthcoming about the level of commitment youre looking for. Once youve chosen the positions, lets dive into the specific bullet points about work experience in a cv. Each one should include:

How do I write a student CV? A student CVfor a first job should contain full details on your education and ideally also contain details on any student jobs or volunteer work that you have done while you were studying. It doesn’t matter how menial this work was, the most important thing is that you understand the responsibility of doing a paid day’s work.

Work Experience For A Laboratory Assistant Example

This example only uses bullet points. Each bullet point is one line or less, and there are only six bullet points total. These are important formatting tips, because it helps keep blocks of text to a minimum.

Notice that each bullet point of your resume starts with a strong action word. This trick makes the candidate appear active, engaged, and impressive.

This resume work experience example also incorporates a lot of skills common to the laboratory testing field: analyze, testing, measurement, and treatment. It also gives context to how this applicant displays soft skills like teamwork, communication, and collaboration. This is a great example of incorporating keywords through a resume.

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Include Relevant Achievements Using Experience Synonyms

Under each job you list, include three or four bullet points that outline your most noteworthy achievements in that position. The most detailed job description can be for your most recent position. In this section, you can use experience synonyms or active verbs to highlight your achievements. For instance, using active verbs such as coordinated, classified, empowered, effected, earned, and inspired may help you properly explain what you have achieved in your previous roles.

Omitting Jobs From Your Resume

There may be a variety of circumstances that may lead you to wanting to omit certain jobs from your resume.

For instance, if you were fired from your previous position, you may feel inclined to try and hide this information out of fear of it leaving a bad impression on hiring managers.

However, even jobs you were fired from should be included if they are relevant working experience

Being fired from a previous job is not an automatic deal breaker in most cases, and including that position on your resume is oftentimes preferred over leaving unexplained gaps in your employment history.

Moreover, you do not have to explicitly state on your resume that you were fired.

Should this be a topic of concern, it will likely come up in a job interview at which point you can more clearly and directly explain what happened.

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Emphasize Your Retail Skills

You can also mention your retail abilities in your skills section to show employers the soft or hard skills you have. For example, communication is a soft skill that enables you to work well with customers and colleagues in a retail or another work setting. Familiarity with certain software is a hard skill that may enable you to organize data efficiently in a job.

Add Numbers To Your Bullet Points When Possible

Use numbers to describe your work experience whenever you can, because numbers give hiring managers a better idea of what you can accomplish.

Anything that shows how you measurably improved performance can be included on your resume.

Examples of how you can use numbers to describe your achievements include talking about:

• percent increases in something good
• percent decreases in something bad
• total money saved on something

Here are some examples of bullet points that include numbers:

• Increased annual sales by 30% by running a marketing campaign in a new market
• Saved company $280,000 per year on printing costs by purchasing two high-end printers and supervising user training
• Organized a series of community-focused events that resulted in a 200% increase in local engagement and earned $450,000 over two years

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Hard Skills Vs Soft Skills In Your Resume

There are endless skills that you can include on any resume, and you have to decide which ones will be the most effective. There are hard, industry-specific technical skills, as well as soft skills that every job demands.

Hard skills are technical abilities that are specific to a particular job and are often measurable. For software developers, their set of hard skills would include specific programming languages. Soft skills are personal skills or creative abilities that can come naturally or be strengthened over time. Some examples of soft skills are adaptability, self-motivation, people skills, time management, and the ability to work under pressure.

Some great skills employers love to see on your resume if you are looking for remote work are: written and verbal communication, the ability to work independently, time and task management, organization, comfort with technology, and specific knowledge of remote communication tools like Zoom, Skype, Dropbox, Google Suite, etc., shared Toni Frana, FlexJobs expert career coach.

Lets take a closer look at the skills section for your resume.

Note: FlexJobs is the longtime leader in helping job seekers find the highest-quality remote, work-from-home, hybrid, and flexible jobs. You can to our database of hand-screened job listings, as well as job search and career webinars, and many other great resources! Learn today howFlexJobs can empower your job search!

List Examples That Apply To Each Element

Let’s review a workplace scenario where we can use all these elements:

Situation

In my previous role as a project coordinator, I was responsible for ensuring on-time deliverables for all clients, so they’re satisfied with the delivery and the quality of the organization’s products.

Task

As the leader of the front-line staff, it was my responsibility to keep track and meet deadlines every week until we got a new project manager on board. I also had to be the liaison between multiple departments to ensure the completion of work that’s due to the client.

Action

I set up and led team meetings with our project team to streamline workflow, improve team collaboration and troubleshoot additional issues when needed.

Result

Within two months, the company’s project output increased by 20 percent and profit rose by 30 percent.

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Where To Put Your Work History Section On Your Resume

Short answer: If you have any work experience at all, this section is the #1 most important thing on your resume and the first place hiring managers and recruiters look. It should be on the top half of the first page.

Dont put your Skills section before it. No hiring manager or recruiter wants to see a general list of your skills before they see your work experience. You can read more about how to write your resume Skills section and where to list it here.

Dont put your Education section before it, either, unless you are a Doctor or have a Ph.D. and are in a profession where this educational background is a hard requirement to obtaining any job in the field.

For everyone else, which is 95%+ of people, just put your name and contact details centered at the top of your resume, then put a one-paragraph career summary, and then go right into your work experience.

You can label the section whatever you want: Work History, Employment History, or Work Experience, etc.

But the point is your work history should be extremely easy to find, without the hiring manager having to search or scroll down.