Work Experience on a CV: How to Present Your Job History

Your work experience should be listed on your CV, but its location differs depending on your level of experience.

If you:

• are a student or entry-level applicant with no experience, place your education section at the top of your CV underneath your CV personal statement
• have some work experience (even volunteering work or internships), place your work history ahead of your education section

Once you know where to place your work history section, it’s simple to write. Here’s an example you can look at to see how to write a CV job history entry, or you can skip ahead to our writing tips.

Work experience on CV: example

Here’s what a CV work experience entry should look like:

How to format your job history on your CV

Formatting a CV correctly involves presenting your work history in an easy-to-understand way. Here’s how to format your CV work experience properly so employers can quickly understand your value:

1. 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.

2. Create a work entry header

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

1. the company’s name
2. 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:

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

For example, on Ynys Môn, there are two Asda branches (Llangefni and Holyhead), so if you worked at one of them, you’d specify which branch 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.

Here’s an example CV work experience entry header:

3. Start your bullet points with action verbs

Action verbs are strong openings to your bullet points, and replace clichéd and meaningless 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, which are more impressive to employers.

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:

4. Also add numbers to each bullet point

Introducing hard numbers into your bullets is another great way 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.

This bullet point gives insight into 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 for a firm
• amount of money (or percentage increase) you helped secure for your employer
• number of events you organised

How to write a CV job history section with no work experience

If you’ve yet to spend time in employment, here’s how you can still write an effective CV:

1. Add other relevant experience to your CV

Your experience section doesn’t have to only include professional work experience. 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

If your school makes you 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 the telephone to 10 customers and transferred them to the correct department
• 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.

2. Use a skills-based CV

A skills based CV features only a small work experience section. Your skills section is the largest section on your CV instead.

Rather than listing work experience entries, list your skills with bullet points underneath that showcase these skills in action. Here’s what a skills-based CV looks like:

This skills-based CV contains bullet points that relate to skills that come mainly from university experience and part-time work, but you can also use this format on a school leaver CV.