Work Experience on a Resume: The Ultimate Guide

Your resume’s work experience section is the most important part to work on. In this section, you’ll share your greatest accomplishments in an effort to persuade a hiring manager to give you a chance to prove yourself in an interview. Not only will it be helpful to put effort into this section, you’ll also need to make sure your work experience measures up. In this article, we’re going to share three key things: how to gain work experience for your resume when you don’t have any yet, the difference in levels of work experience, how to write your work experience section for your resume, and the work experience format to ensure you land that essential interview.

How to Gain Work Experience for Your Resume

1. Start a side hustle

A side hustle is a project you work in your spare time to make money. It could be everything from writing your very own blog to building video games from scratch. This is particularly helpful in developing some skills and monetizing them proving that you’ve developed those skills well. A side hustle is not only great for students looking to apply their education into a money-making endeavor. It’s also a great option for career changers who are looking to transition into a new industry or craft and wanting to prove they’ve developed the skills to do it. Your work experience doesn’t have to be a typical 9 to 5 job. You can add blogs you own, freelance gigs you’ve held, and more and share the skills you’ve developed onto your resume.

2. Apply for an internship

If you’re currently in the middle of a school program, you might apply for an internship while completing your studies to help you develop real-world skills while still in school. Some college or trade school programs have internship programs built into them to help you gain work experience before you graduate. These internships can be completed at companies that offer internships or they can be done at volunteer programs where you help a charity or non-profit using the skills you’ve learned. Internships allow you to gain access to a mentor who will provide guidance to you as you start out in your career and develop your skill set. They might give you feedback on how you can improve your work using their own experience. These internships can be added to your work experience on your resume.

3. Apply for a volunteer position

If you don’t have any work experience under your belt yet, a good way to develop your skills is to apply for volunteer positions in your craft. For example, a doctor could apply as a volunteer doctor abroad. A sales person can work in a fundraising role for a charity. An accountant can help a charity with their bookkeeping. Overall, charities often have multiple needs they could use assistance in that could allow you to gain some experience, even if it’s unpaid. Adding volunteer positions to your resume could also be a great way to get a reference from someone when you’re still starting out in your career.

4. Join a school club

Many students are known to add clubs and extracurricular activities to their resumes as work experience. In these extracurricular activities, you’ll develop skills, such as soft skills like leadership skills, debating, or communication or hard skills like web design, writing, and budget management. These extracurricular activities also help you build a network of friends who could be influential later in your career for networking opportunities and more. Adding your extracurricular activities onto your resume could be a great way to showcase work experience and skills you’ve developed during your time in school.

5. Attend job fairs

Job fairs are typically organized by schools or cities to help people find meaningful jobs. A job fair is also a great opportunity to start networking with professionals to potentially get your foot in the door at a company you’d like to work for some day. You could bring your resume to a job fair to meet with potential employers. It’s a great way to get some interview practice as well. You get to practice speaking with someone to showcase who you are, your qualifications, and why you’d be a great fit. During these job fairs, you could test out different pitches to see which one lands best with people in person. Then, when you actually land an interview, you’ll know the best way to present yourself to a hiring manager, to help boost your chances of landing a job.

5. Complete boot camp programs

There are so many job training programs out there where you can complete a quick 12-week program or so and learn a vital skill while building a portfolio throughout the program. These boot camp programs have high rates of success when it comes to their students landing jobs. So, you’ll have access to the education you need to secure a job, the portfolio that helps you present yourself to a hiring manager, and you’ll gain career advice that you can use to help you secure that job. Popular fields like marketing, data science, software engineering, cybersecurity, UI/UX design, and more all have boot camp programs available. If you’re hoping to land a coveted tech job, you can find programs online with ease.

6. Join a mentorship program

To build work experience, you can connect with a mentor who will guide you through the job search process, help you prepare for interviews, take a look at your resume, and more. You can find mentorship programs online via professional associations, bootcamps, your school, or other programs. Professional associations often have mentorship programs for students allowing them to attend networking events, have one-on-ones with someone who works in the industry, and gain career advice that’ll help them on their journey. Joining professional associations will often give you access to exclusive job listings that you’ll have access to that you can apply to with the help of your mentor.

7. Build an audience on LinkedIn

Building an audience on LinkedIn can help you attract more career opportunities. You can gain work experience by putting yourself in a position to have more visibility for yourself online. Hiring managers, recruiters, and industry professionals will follow people on LinkedIn who create content on the platform. The more followers you have, the more visibility your profile will get. So, you’ll end up attracting more job opportunities. You’ll need to stick with this for years on end to set yourself up for success long-term. Put the focus on talking about your field of expertise, such as marketing, engineering, nursing, and so on. And avoid saying anything negative or disparaging about your workplace publicly. Always keep your content professional and positive. While sad stories or rage-bait content can uplift your views, hiring managers may overlook hiring you because of your attitude.

Levels of Work Experience

Entry level

Entry level jobs are jobs you can gain without any work experience. An entry level job is typically geared towards students or career changers. These jobs are the easiest to get without having the required skills for a role. However, they’re also the lowest paying positions as well. These jobs help you develop some work experience so you can eventually advance to better positions in your field.

Intermediate level

After you’ve mastered some new skills from an entry level position you’re ready to start applying for an intermediate level role. You’ll likely have less supervision in this type of role, where you’ll be able to work independently while doing your job. These positions offer slightly better pay. Since people in these positions have more advanced skills, there’s a bit more competition for these kinds of roles for people who already hold jobs in the field.

Mid-level

In mid-level roles, you’ll have quite a bit of experience under your belt. You might be a manager in this position, regardless of whether or not you’re managing a team. People in these positions often work independently of their boss though they may work collaboratively with others. They often manage projects at work, have set targets or tasks to complete, and work with people above and below them.

Senior and executive level

Jobs in these levels are often leadership roles. They’re either senior or executive leadership positions, like heads of departments, directors, VPs, founders, or executive roles. These roles require the most experience and are some of the hardest positions to attain in your career. You’ll likely be leading an entire department of people or function of a company. They’re often under the most pressure as most of the company’s success lies on their shoulders. They may steer the ship so to speak with their vision and strategies.

How to Write Your Work Experience on Your Resume

Your work experience section of your resume is the most important part hiring managers are looking to read. When you write this section of your resume, your goal is to always put your most important accomplishments at the top of each company you work at, in other words, your best accomplishment should be your first bullet point.

Hiring managers prefer reading work experience in a STAR format. The STAR format is as follows:

Situation: This is a brief point about the past job, detailing what situation or challenge you were facing.

Task: This is where you explain the task you did. Most people only include tasks on resumes but this should only be one part of your bullet point rather than the entire basis of your work experience. It’s not just about what you did.

Action: This is where you explain your role in the work. How did you contribute to achieve something? What was your main action that you took?

Result: This is where you share your main accomplishment. What did you achieve? Was there a target or KPI you hit? Is there data you can share? How did you help your company or team?

While it seems like there are four sentences worth of things here, you can actually add all these concepts into a single bullet point on your resume. Explaining your success in this way will help you elevate your accomplishments to stand out to a hiring manager.

Work Experience Format

Job title

Your work experience starts off with your job title in your current or previous role. You can list your latest job title if you were promoted during your time in the company to position yourself in the best light.

Company name

Your work experience section needs to list the name of the company you worked for. When you accept an offer at your next company, they may ask for references from this specific company to prove that you did in fact work there.

The Company’s Location

You need to list the location you worked in. For example, some companies have branches in multiple cities. It helps a hiring manager know where you’ve worked.

Dates

Dates are important to add to your resume, so hiring managers can see the timeline of when you worked at a company. The downside to adding dates is that hiring managers can see employment gaps. Still, it’s necessary to include the dates you worked at a company. If you still work at a company, you would add the word “Present” instead of the current date.

Accomplishments

It’s recommended to add three to five bullet points. If you’re trying to keep your resume to one page, adding your three most recent jobs and three best accomplishments per job will fit everything onto a page without you needing to play with margins. The goal isn’t to add as much content as possible to your accomplishments, it’s about surfacing your biggest accomplishments instead.

The work experience format is as follows:

Content Marketing Manager, ABC Company, Toronto, ON

12/2023-Present

• Wrote 100 blog posts which generated 1,000,000 views organically through SEO and content distribution efforts
• Scaled programmatic SEO efforts using ChatGPT to increase the number of sign-ups by 30%
• Wrote ebook “How to Master Your ABCs” which generated over 30,000 email subscribers in six months

Conclusion

If you’re currently working on your resume, consider using Huntr’s AI resume builder. The AI resume builder can help you brainstorm bullet points to add based on your job title while helping you write the bullet points in a captivating format. Huntr also has a resume checker, which grades your resume while giving you feedback on how you can improve your resume. And you can even use Huntr to tailor your resume. With the resume tailor, you’ll be able to see how much your current resume matches the job you’re applying for so you can improve your chances of your resume landing an interview. To start building your resume, sign up for Huntr today.