The right way to describe work experience on a resume

If we asked you what the most important section of your resume is, you will promptly reply, “The work experience section” and you will not be wrong. Your career history is the bread and butter of your resume. A rich work experience section will have hiring managers dying to meet you. But how exactly do you write a strong career history for your resume ?

What is included in the work experience section?

This is the section of the resume where you paint a vivid picture of your career for the employer. Your resume’s work experience section must briefly describe your biggest accomplishments at your past jobs. For this, you will need to make a few job entries in reverse chronological order. Each entry must list the job title, company name, company location, and relevant dates, followed by 3 – 6 bullet points highlighting your professional achievements in the role.

How should you prioritize the work experience that goes on your resume?

As a rule of thumb, your most recent and most relevant experiences must be mentioned first on your resume, followed by the older jobs. We do not advise you to include jobs that are older than 10-15 years because it might lead to age discrimination during the hiring process. However, if you must mention your older jobs, such as in the case of a career shift, you can create a separate “Early Experience” section and mention your older jobs there. But keep in mind to remove all dates older than 10-15 years.

How to format the work experience section of your resume?

Your main goal when creating a work experience section should be to emphasize your biggest professional achievements. Hence, you must format the career history of the resume to bring out the most valuable information there. The best formatting tool you have to emphasize achievements is the bulleted list. Use bulleted lists to mention achievements in each role of your career. Also, left align the content of your career history so that employers have no trouble finding your job titles and companies. You can align the dates to the right. Use bold text to emphasize company names and job titles.

What are the most important components of the work experience section?

Without a doubt, the bullet points are the most important elements of your work experience section. Write powerful bullet points, and you will pique the interest of every single hiring manager. Write lukewarm bullet points, and you will find your resume in the trashcan. Here is an article that teaches you how to write strong and powerful bullet points for your resume.

How should you organize bullet points?

The order of your bullet points matters. You must never place the most significant accomplishments toward the end of the list. This will cause hiring managers to skip over those as they are trained to expect the best achievements to be listed first on a resume. You should organize your bullet points carefully for maximum impact. Here’s what you need to do:

• Make a list of bullet points for each job entry.
• Sort bullet points by their relevance to the new job.
• The most relevant bullet points must go first, followed by others.
• Choose the best 3 – 6 bullet points from the list.
• If any bullet point is unrelated to the job, snip them.
• Place the most impressive bullet points first on your resume.

#workexperience #internship #education #career #college #student #work #careeradvice #anticorruption #travel #youthanticorruption #job #university #teachers #careerpath #experience #training #interview #business #students #jobexperience #global #challenges #technology #corruption #compliance #governmentcorruption #professionals #hackathon #anticorruptionday