Work Experience CV: Section Examples & How to Write

When a recruiter reviews job applications, they’re most likely to schedule interviews with applicants who describe relevant work experience on their CVs.

So if you have any work experience — including volunteer work and internships — put it in a well-written, professionally formatted CV work experience section to increase your chances of getting hired.

Work experience on a CV (example & template)

Here’s what a CV work experience entry should look like, followed by a template that you can copy and paste into your writing program:

6 tips for describing work experience on your CV

Including your work experience on a CV doesn’t have to be difficult.

To help you confidently show your value to a company, we provide a video walkthrough on how you can write an excellent work history section.

You can also read below for 6 more tips on describing previous work experiences on your CV:

1. Apply proper formatting

Each position in your CV work experience section should have its own header to clearly differentiate it from the others. The first item in the header can either be:

• the company’s name
• your job title

It’s up to you which option you pick, but if you worked at a particularly prestigious organisation, consider using its name as your work entry header. Here’s an example:

If your job title was more impressive, you can list that first:

Whether you use the company name or your job title as your entry’s header, stick to that choice for all the jobs in your work experience section for consistency and to make reading your CV easier for the employer.

Your work entry header should also include the location of your workplace. Specifying the town is usually enough, but if a company has multiple locations in the same town, add a branch name for clarity.

You also need to add dates to your header to clarify the extent of your experience. It’s fine to leave off months if you’re concerned there’s a long gap between two jobs.

Compare these two ways of formatting dates on a CV:

On the right-hand-side sample, there’s a clear 7-month gap between jobs, which might raise a red flag for employers. Fix this potential problem by leaving the months off.

After you’ve formatted your entry headers, write your job descriptions underneath them in lists of 3–5 bullet points (less than 3 bullets will make recruiters think you didn’t achieve much, but more than 5 is too much reading for them).

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2. List your work experience in chronological order

It may sound obvious, but it’s important to list your work experience in chronological order because employers can easily see how your career has progressed and how the listed skills on your CV have developed over time.

So start with your current (or most recent) job, and work backwards.

3. Include other relevant experience

Your CV’s work experience section doesn’t have to only include professional experience. If you’re writing a CV as a recent graduate or a school leaver, you can include entries on many other life experiences such as:

• volunteer work
• your hobbies and interests
• extracurricular activities
• student union/society roles
• work placements/internships

For instance, if your school requires you to do a fortnight’s work placement as part of Year 10 or 11, here’s how you could display this experience on your CV:

British Telecom, Manchester (2020)
Office Assistant (work placement)

• Photocopied 25+ documents and collated them in the correct order
• Answered telephone calls from 10 customers and transferred them to the correct departments
• Handled tea and biscuits requests for a team of 47, distributing tea break snacks with 100% accuracy
• Learned how to use customer relationship management software

If you’re writing a graduate CV, you can present any internships and student union or society roles in the same way. Remember to add numbers to each bullet point if possible to provide context to your achievements.

4. Rewrite the job descriptions on your CV for each role you target

To give yourself the best chance of landing a job you want, rewrite your CV’s work experience section for every job you apply for. Your goal is to emphasise your skills that are relevant to that particular job by:

• including keywords from the job advert
• rearranging your bullet points so your most job-relevant achievements come first (this makes it easier for recruiters to see them)
• removing information that’s irrelevant to the role

5. Start your bullet points with action verbs

Action verbs (like ‘educate’ and ‘inspire’) are strong openings to your bullet points and replace clichéd sentence starters like:

• Responsible for
• Tasked with
• Entrusted with

The problem with these (and similar sentence starters) is they naturally make you write about your work-related duties instead of your achievements. What you’ve accomplished at work is more impressive to employers than the routine tasks you completed.

Compare this strong bullet point with one that starts with a dull opening:

The second example is better because it starts with an action verb that conveys the applicant’s achievements and shows they’re a proactive, thoughtful, and dedicated waiter.

Here are more examples of strong action verbs for your CV:

6. Quantify your experience with examples and hard numbers

Put hard numbers in your bullets wherever possible to showcase your achievements to employers and recruiters.

Numbers provide context about the kind of output you’re able to produce. Here’s an example of hard numbers added to a CV bullet point:

• Upsold wine by informing customers about good wine–food pairings, leading to an 11% increase in wine sales

The percentage in this bullet point highlights this employee’s interpersonal skills, sales skills, and dedication to friendly customer service.

Here are more ideas of things you can quantify (make into numbers) in your CV’s work experience section:

• number of customers served
• amount of money you saved
• amount of money (or percentage increase) you secured for your employer
• number of events you organised

CV work experience examples

Below are examples of CV work experience sections for various applicants, followed by a full CV example with work experience. Take a look at these examples to get ideas for how to describe your experience in a way that gets recruiters interested in interviewing (and then hiring) you:

Work experience section examples for different types of applicants

Click the dropdown below that best matches your situation to view a job-winning CV work experience entry example:

CV example with work experience

This is an example of work experience on a full CV to give you an idea of how your work history section should fit in with the rest of your sections:

Download Work Experience CV Example

3 common questions about putting work experience on a CV

Still have questions about how to talk about your CV’s work experience section? Our CV-writing experts have answered 3 of the most frequent queries about how to add work experience to your CV:

 

 

 

 

More CV writing FAQs

Here are expert answers to more questions people often ask about writing a CV:

• Are a resume and CV the same?
• Why is a CV important?
• How do I make a CV for my first job in the UK?
• What do I include in a CV?
• What does a good CV look like?
• How do I write an English CV?