How to Write Work Experience on a CV (With Examples)

What each job entry needs

• Job title: your real title. If it's unusual or in another language, add the common equivalent in brackets, such as “Sachbearbeiterin (Accounts Administrator)”.
• Employer and place: the company name and city. Add a short line of context if the company isn't well known: “Family-owned logistics firm, 120 staff”.
• Dates: month and year, written the same way everywhere (“03/2022 – present” or “Mar 2022 – present”). Years alone hide whether a job lasted two months or two years.
• Bullet points: 3–5 for recent jobs, 1–2 for older ones. Bullets beat paragraphs: recruiters skim, and an applicant tracking system reads them reliably.

Turn duties into results

Your job description tells the reader what you were supposed to do. Your CV should tell them what happened because you did it. Use one pattern for every bullet: an action verb, what you did, and the result, with a number wherever you honestly can (money, time, volume, percentages, people, ratings).

• Customer service. Before: “Responsible for handling customer complaints.” After: “Resolved about 40 complaints a week by phone and chat, cutting average response time from 2 days to 4 hours.”
• Sales. Before: “Sold products to new clients.” After: “Won 18 new B2B accounts in 2025, adding €240,000 in annual revenue (128% of target).”
• Nurse. Before: “Cared for patients on the ward.” After: “Cared for up to 8 patients per shift on a 30-bed surgical ward; trained 5 new nurses on the electronic health record system.”
• Warehouse. Before: “Picking and packing orders.” After: “Picked and packed 250+ orders per shift at 99.8% accuracy; licensed forklift operator.”
• Software developer. Before: “Worked on the checkout.” After: “Rebuilt the checkout in React and TypeScript, cutting page load time by 38% and lifting conversion by 6%.”
• Teacher. Before: “Taught maths to secondary students.” After: “Taught maths to 5 classes (130 students); pass rate in final exams rose from 71% to 84% in two years.”

Don't have exact figures? Use honest approximations (“about”, “up to”, “more than”) or scale words: how many people, customers, sites or products your work touched. Never invent numbers; you'll be asked about them in the interview.

Strong action verbs to start with

Start each bullet with a verb that says what you did, in the past tense for previous jobs: led, built, cut, grew, launched, negotiated, trained, resolved, organised, delivered, reduced, improved, managed, designed, analysed. Avoid weak openers like “responsible for”, “helped with” and “involved in”: they hide what your part was.

Special cases

• Several roles at one employer: name the employer once, then list each role with its own dates. Promotions are worth showing.
• Short, temporary or agency jobs: group them under one heading, such as “Temporary assignments via Randstad, 2023–2024”, with a few combined bullets.
• Freelance or self-employed work: list it like a job (“Freelance graphic designer”), with your main clients or projects and results.
• Internships, volunteering and student jobs: if your experience is short, these count; write them in the same results format.
• Gaps: a career break needs a one-line, honest explanation, not a cover-up. Our employment gaps guide shows how.
• Career change: lead with the bullets that use skills from the new field, and translate jargon from your old industry.

How far back to go

Describe the last 10–15 years in detail. Older jobs can be summarised as a single line (“Earlier roles in retail management, 2004–2010”) or left out if they add nothing for this job. Relevance beats completeness: a recruiter reading for a project manager role does not need your summer job from 2005.