How to write the work experience section

Most work experience sections describe the job rather than the person who did it. Swap either one for a colleague and the text would not change. That is the problem to fix, and it is fixable in an afternoon.

The structure

Job title, employer, location, dates. Then three to five bullets. Most recent role first, and give it the most space — a reader cares far more about what you did last year than in 2014.

Write bullets as outcomes

A useful bullet has three parts: what you did, how you did it, and what changed as a result. The third part is the one people leave out, and it is the only part that is really about you.

• Duty: "Responsible for stock management."
• Outcome: "Rebuilt the stock count process, cutting write-offs from CHF 14,000 to CHF 4,000 a year."
• Duty: "Handled customer complaints."
• Outcome: "Resolved escalated complaints as second line, closing 88% without referral to the ombudsman."

Numbers, and what to do without them

Numbers are not there to impress. They force the sentence to be about a result. If you do not have a metric, use scale or frequency instead: how many people, how often, how large, how long. "Trained 23 new starters" is a number. So is "ran the night shift of 40".

Start with a verb, and vary it

Led, rebuilt, cut, introduced, negotiated, trained, recovered, automated, standardised. Avoid opening five bullets in a row with "Responsible for" — it reads as a job description because it is one.

Older roles

Roles from more than about ten years ago need a line each, not five bullets. Anything beyond fifteen years can usually be collapsed: "Earlier roles at Brightwater, Corvid and Halden, 2004–2011." Nobody is hiring you for what you did in 2007.