Work Experience Resume Section

Work Experience Resume Section.

The work experience section your resume is to single most important section in your resume.  This area often will be what convinces an employer to call you for an interview.  Despite its importance, all too often job seekers neglect this, the “meat and potatoes” area of your resume.  In today’s article, I will show you what you can do to beef up your work experience and convince an employer to grant you an interview.

Live In The Now.

The first mistake that I always see in resumes is that the job applicant includes work history that is way too dated.  A good rule of thumb is to only include work history within the last 10 years of your career.  The jobseekers with lots of work experience are most guilty of this mistake.  These job applicants allow their extensive work experience to work against them by including work history that’s way too old.  When you include experience that’s from way back in your past you create an image that you are not confident with your current experience and accomplishments.  It gives an impression to an employer that you are clinging onto the past and that your best days as an employee are over.  So what should you do if you do have 20 years work experience?  How do you decide what to include from your work history and what to exclude?

The first rule of thumb is to only include relevant work experience.  It doesn’t matter if you work at McDonald’s 20 years ago, if you are not up line for a job in the restaurant business.  Remember that the most support rule in resume writing is that every piece of information you include competes with the other.  So ask yourself, “How much should benefit by including this information?  Does this competing or watered-down existing information on my resume?”

Lastly, I see job applicants repeating themselves over and over again on their resume.  If the last five jobs you held had the same job title and similar duties, then it is no use to repeat information over and over again.  Instead, focus on how each job slightly different or think about your problems achievements in each job and write those down.

Career Highlights, Not Your Life Story.

When you write the work experience section of your resume, capture the highlights and accomplishments of your career.  Most job seekers make the fundamental mistake of seeing this as an opportunity to make an exhaustive list of job duties.  This resume writing approach is not effective, and bores employers to death.  Remember, the goal is to provide a summary and sample of to work experience not your life story.

Can You Measure Up?  Quantify Your Achievements.

Employers want to hire people who can deliver results.  As such, hiring managers search for resumes that contain career accomplishments, or achievements.  The most powerful thing that you can do in your resume is to list a sample of your proudest career achievements.  And remember, any good career achievement becomes a great achievement when you quantify them with numbers.  Here is a sample resume phrase that illustrates a great career achievement, “Improved production method to increase efficiency by 35%.”

Scope And Depth.

One of the things that we see jobseekers forget when describing their work is the scope and depth of the work experience.  When we talk about scope and depth of work experience, were looking for ways to describe to a prospective employer, the type of experience you had.  Also by including scope and depth, you provide context for employer which is critical information in the hiring decision.  For example, suppose you are a payroll manager.  Rather than simply indicating your areas of responsibilities, etc., you should describe the size of the payroll, the complexity of it, and the number of people you are managing to give “scope and depth.”  to your work experience.  A great sample resume phrase for this payroll manager example might be the following, “Led a team of 12 and managed a $200,000 monthly payroll that included 3 collective agreements”.  This lasts sample resume phrase shows a hiring manager the size of the payroll and the complexity of it, in other words, it provides scope and depth.  The result is that it qualifies you, because there’s a big difference between managing a payroll for a company of five employees and a company of 5000 employees.

Customized Work Experience Headings

Be creative and to work experience headings, remember that the hiring manager seen hundreds and hundreds of resumes and is quite frankly bored of looking at similar CVs.  Don’t be afraid to customize the work experience headings in your resume.  Suppose you were applying for nursing position, rather than using the heading, “work experience” you could use the heading, “Nursing Experience”.  By doing this you will have a better chance of getting the attention of the nursing, administrator.