How to Write Work Experience in Your Resume [Step-By-Step Guide]

The work experience section is an essential part of your resume. It’s the one thing the recruiter really cares about and pays the most attention to.

Your previous experiences are seen as a good indicator of how you’ll handle the new job. This section, however, is not just a list of your previous responsibilities. It's meant to present you as a wholesome candidate by showcasing your relevant accomplishments and should be tailored specifically to the particular position you're applying to.

Education, skills and hobbies are all great but it's the work experience section that ultimately decides whether you get the job or not.

And no, more university degrees doesn’t mean better jobs - creating a killer resume work experience section does.

As we’ve mentioned before, the work experience section is the bulk of your resume and is a key part of all successful resume templates.Think of it as the sales pitch that’s going to land you the job.

You can mention anything you've put your time and labor in, including:

• Professional Experience - Your career goes here. Essentially any job you've ever worked that's in the relevant field & industry.
• “Unskilled” Experience - That part-time hostess job during college goes here.
• Internships - Unpaid or paid.
• Part-time Gigs - Did you collect unused stuff on Craigslist and sell it on E-Bay? Anything along those lines.
• Volunteering - NGOs, non-profits, etc.

Before we dive into the details, we’ll explain the most basic and important principles about this section.

Be Brief & Relevant

The work experience section should be the detailed summary of your latest 3 or 4 positions. The “3 or 4” part is important here - the recruiter wants to know how relevant you are for the job without having to read your entire life story.

For example, if you are a programmer with 20 years of experience, would you really mention your very first internship?

On a similar note, you’d want your work experiences to be relevant to the job you’re applying for. Get into the recruiter's head for a minute - you’re reading 2 resumes for the position of financial analyst.

Which of these two statements looks more “relevant?”

The first one gets a callback. The second gets a confused glance and a trip to the paper shredder. That being said, there are some exceptions. Sometimes, you’d want to include your seemingly “irrelevant” experiences to show your skills.

Confused? Well, let’s say you have these two people applying for a job in sales.

You’d go for the first one because of 2 reasons.

1. General Experience - In most cases, the recruiter would prefer someone with some experience rather than none. It shows that they’ve worked before in their lives, and won’t just stand around looking confused on the first day of work.
2. Transferable Skills - Every job teaches you skills, be it very basic ones. As a waiter, for example, you've probably learned how to interact with customers. When you apply for a sales associate position, you'll end up using these same skills.

Having previous work experience is super helpful. But what if you just graduated? Not to worry, we've got tips for recent grads as well.

While the content of your resume work experience section is important, it’s essential to get the formatting right. The two go hand in hand. How?

Most big companies these days use Applicant Tracking Systems - software that scans your resume and determines how relevant you are for the position.

So if the formatting is somehow messed up or too far from traditional norms, no one’s going to even look at your resume! This is why it’s essential to get the formatting right.

The first thing to do with the formatting is to create the experience section. The font size should be the same as any other section headings in your resume, and it can be in bold, CAPITALS, italics, etc. depending on your general theme.

Then, list the basic information about your work experience. Follow this example for each position:

The company description mentioned here is optional - you might want to mention it in case it's a company most people have never heard of. Otherwise, skip it and use this space for an additional bullet point.

As for responsibilities and achievements, the average number you want to hit is 6: It’s optimal enough to describe your experiences with a company properly, while leaving room for your other experiences.

This, however, is not set in stone, and is up to you. Let's have a look at an example:

Now that you know how to format your resume work experience section, have a look at how to format it so that the recruiter sees you're the one right off the bat!

Technically, there is no right or wrong way to list your experiences. There’s no central resume authority deciding on what should or should not be on a resume.

There are, however, some best practices that’ll take you a long way. The most important of which is:

Selling Yourself the Right Way

I hard to say which of your responsibilities & achievements are best mentioned in a resume.

You did, after all, work in that company for months (or years, maybe decades?). You were in charge of so many things, you can barely even remember all of them! So, where do you start?

It's actually quite simple - mention only your greatest achievements. Don't get bogged down by describing your duties. If your resume says that you've worked as a retail manager for 5 years and you're applying for a position of a retail manager, the recruiter already knows what duties the position includes.

It makes sense that what’s really going to set you apart are your achievements:

• Did you manage to save the store from being over-flooded by customers on Black Friday?
• Did your management lead to much lower customer complaint reports than last year?
• Are you literally super-human and can endure 200 hour work-weeks?

These are the type od things that’ll take you from “a candidate” to “THE CANDIDATE.”

As for how you’d list your achievements, here's the best advice to keep in mind:

Quantification is King

Saying that you’re good is one thing. Proving that you’re good is what matters. The best way to impress is to demonstrate your achievements with numbers. After you've got your core experience inserted into a resume you're creating from scratch, or one of these resume templates, make sure to quantify appropriately, like this:

The first shows how good you are. The second gives a general idea, but it doesn’t really say anything.

Now let’s see how all this would fare in a real-life scenario. The position applied for is that of a customer support manager at a retail company.

The ideal candidate will be put in charge of hiring, managing, and ensuring the productivity of 15+ cashiers.

There are, of course, professions and fields where you just can’t quantify your achievements, and that’s fine.

In such case, just list the job responsibilities as usual. But again, whenever you have the chance, use numbers to show the recruiter how good you are.

ATS & Tailoring

We’ve talked about ATS or Application Tracking Systems before. But to refresh your memory, it’s the software that most big companies use filter thru resumes by “keywords” and to bring the most relevant candidates in for interviews.

Let’s take a sample job description and see how that would work with an ATS.

The hiring manager then picks several keywords that are important for the job. Here, for example, would be marketing, leadership, marketing software or any synonyms of those.

In order to be a perfect match, you’d want to mention each of these in your resume work experience section or the skills section.

Now, let’s turn that into an example resume section:

The job title of your previous position mentions “marketing.” There’s experience with leadership mentioned (i.e. managed), and finally, there’s MarketingSoftware mentioned.

Check, check, check.

IRRELEVANT OR TRANSFERABLE WORK EXPERIENCE

#irrelevant-or-transferable-work-experience

If you’re switching industries, the resume work experience section can be a tough nut to crack. Which work experience should you mention? Do you start completely from scratch?

In case you list all of your experience, chances are that you'd get ignored as not all of it would be relevant. In the second case, you’re going to look like you’ve been unemployed for too long.

The best-practice here is to mention the existing relevant experience.

How? Well, instead of listing your achievements and responsibilities as you typically would, you look at the whole thing from a different angle: What skills did your previous career give you that would be useful in the new field?

As a simple example, let’s say you’re a customer support representative with 5+ years of experience. You’re a killer on the phone - even the most disgruntled customer turns into your biggest fan after a 5-minute conversation.

Let's say you want to adapt the skills acquired in one industry to another, for example, going from customer support to sales. How do you do so? Let's have a look at this example:

Now, the difference between the two examples is that the first specifically mentions all the right skills and experiences you’d need in phone sales.

Hundreds of calls a day? That’s a given.

5* customer-satisfaction rating? If you can talk to moody, unsatisfied customers, you can probably sell a new product.

25% higher customer experience rating? You’re not just any other support rep, you’re good at what you do, and are ready to progress.

LISTING WORK EXPERIENCE WITH NO EXPERIENCE

#listing-work-experience-with-no-experience

If you’re a student, then this might seem really tricky. You don’t have any work experience, leaving your entire resume as a one giant blank space with your name & education on it.

Well, actually, “work experience” doesn’t necessarily mean professional work. It can be any of the following:

• Internship Experience
• Transferable Experiences
• Extracurricular Activities
• Projects & Portfolio

Each of these can be listed the same way as any other work experience, with exactly the same formatting:

The work experience section is the hardest part of creating a resume. And now you know everything you need to ace it!

Now it's time to focus on the other sections of your resume. Is your education section, for example, listed the right way?

Or, did you make sure that the formatting of your resume is just as it should be? Maybe you’d even want to brush up on your resume-making skills with our How to Make a Resume [The Visual Guide]?

Whichever the case might be, we’ve got your back!