7 practical tips to mention work experience on a resume

Recruiters and hiring managers are very interested in the work experience section of your resume. They will spend several minutes reading up on your work history when they are interested in meeting you for an interview. This is a great reason for you to invest more time and effort into the work experience section of your resume to produce an interesting read.

1. Select the right kind of experience

Not all your past jobs will be relevant to the job you are applying for. It is okay to omit certain experiences from your resume when they are not relevant to the target job title. However, be careful not to leave long career gaps on the resume in doing so. You can still list the older jobs in a dedicated “Early Experience” section without going into detail on job duties.

2. Decide the length of the section

There’s no need for your work experience to take the most space on your resume, although it usually will for most job seekers. The work history of your resume only needs to be as long as you make it. Stick to the last 10-15 years when describing work experience on your resume. If you are having trouble with it, this article explains how to condense a 20+ year career into a two-page resume quite clearly.

3. Reorder your bullet points

You need to ensure that the hiring manager sees the most impressive details about your career the first when they look at your resume. Place the most important bullet points toward the top of the list when you create your resume. This will make sure that no impressive achievements go unnoticed by a busy hiring manager.

4. Try shortening your bullet points

There’s no need for a bullet point to drag four lines. Keep your bullet points at an ideal one-line length. The maximum length of a bullet point should be two lines, or else you will lose the interest of a reader. You can shorten bullet points by restricting the sentence, rewriting the content, or breaking down the text into several short bullet points.

5. Be as specific as possible

Your work experience section should bring out your unique value proposition to the reader. The key to writing an impactful resume is to incorporate specific details about your career into the document. Start by adding quantified results to describe the professional achievements. Use descriptive action verbs to start your bullet points and let strategically placed adjectives describe your contributions.

6. Vary the number of bullet points

Not every job you have had needs to be described using six detailed bullet points. You can use 1-6 bullet points to talk about the most relevant and most recent roles you have had. Going down the timeline, the less relevant and older jobs can be described in three bullets or less.

7. Use consistent language

The consistency of your writing will affect the readability of your resume. It is among resume writing best practices to use consistent tenses when describing work experience on a resume. Use past tense to talk about past experiences. The present continuous tense works best for describing a current role.