How to Describe Work Experience
3 min read·Updated 3 Nov 2025
Experience is the part of a CV that gets read most carefully and written most carelessly. The typical entry lists what the job involved, which a reader could have guessed from the job title.
What a reader wants is the part only you can supply: what happened because you were in the role rather than someone else.
The test
Read a bullet point and ask whether a colleague with the same job title could have written it word for word. If they could, it describes the role. If it takes something only you did, it describes you.
Applied honestly, this removes about half the content from most CVs. That is the point — the removed half was not being read anyway.
A rewriting method
- Start with the duty as you would naturally write it.
- Add what changed. A number, a percentage, a before and after, a problem that stopped happening.
- Add the scale. How many people, how much money, how many users, how many transactions.
- Add the method, briefly, if it shows judgement. Not the tools you used, but the decision you made.
- Cut back to one sentence. If it needs two, it is probably two bullet points.
Worked examples
The same method applied across different fields:
Weak
Responsible for month-end close.
Stronger
Own the month-end close for three UK entities with combined turnover of £42m, delivering the reporting pack to the board by working day five.
Scope, scale and deadline. In management accounting the working-day deadline is the single most comparable fact about a role.
More examples
- "Managed social media" → "Grew LinkedIn following from 2,400 to 11,000 in eighteen months, which became the source of roughly a third of inbound enquiries."
- "Handled customer complaints" → "Handled around 40 escalated complaints a month, reducing the proportion referred to the ombudsman from nine a year to two."
- "Assisted with recruitment" → "Ran end-to-end recruitment for 40 to 50 roles a year, introducing structured interview scoring that cut time to hire from 47 days to 32."
- "Wrote unit tests" → "Raised coverage of the booking flow from 34% to 81% and added end-to-end checks for the three journeys generating most support tickets."
When you do not have numbers
Not every achievement has a metric, and inventing one is worse than not having one. Where a number is not available, use scale, frequency, or the problem you solved.
"Rewrote the onboarding documentation after three new starters independently got stuck at the same step" has no percentage in it and is still specific, credible and clearly yours.
Formatting the entries
- Job title first, then employer, then location and dates. The title is what a reader scans for.
- Four to six bullets for the current role, three or four for the one before, one line for anything older than about eight years.
- Start each bullet with a verb in the past tense — or present tense for your current role — and be consistent about it.
- No full stops at the end of bullet points, or full stops on all of them. Pick one.
- Avoid opening every bullet with the same verb. Five bullets beginning "Managed" reads as a list rather than a record.
Questions
Should I include a description of the company?
How do I write about work that was confidential?
What about short contracts or temporary work?
Going further
Articles that work through one part of this guide in more detail.
- What to write when you have no numbers to quantifyThe most repeated CV advice is "quantify your achievements". For a great many real jobs the numbers either do not exist, are not yours to share, or would be meaningless out of context. Inventing one is worse than having none.
- Senior without direct reports: showing scope when nobody reports to youHeadcount is the easiest seniority signal to read, which is why CVs lean on it. If you have reached a senior level as an individual contributor, the evidence has to come from somewhere else — and there is usually more of it than people write down.
- Your CV repeats itself, and you are the last person who will noticeA document written in pieces over several years converges on the same few sentences. The person who wrote every one of those pieces is the least able to see it, because rereading your own writing checks the meaning and skips the wording.
Put this into practice
The editor keeps your CV as structured content, so the section order and wording decisions in this guide are easy to apply and easy to change again.