How To Include Your Work Experience In Your Tech Resume

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Understanding how to list your work experience on your resume can make or break whether or not you receive an interview. Relevant work experience is often more important to a recruiter than your education, so it’s important to know what to list and what to omit.

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If you are a recent graduate, you might not have any relevant full-time work experience. But if you have successful group projects or internships, you can list them here. If you don’t have any group projects or internships to showcase, you can skip this section completely.

If you have several years in the industry, you should list the most relevant roles in reverse chronological order with the most recent role listed first.

You can list work experience with the company name, job title, city and state, and months and years worked.

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After writing the general information for your work experience, it’s time to add a bit more context. You can do this by adding three to four bullet points underneath the experience to describe the role in further detail.

Tip #1: State the outcomes

The first tip for creating impactful work experience statements is to state the outcomes you achieved over the responsibilities you had during this job role. Stating impact over logistics will leave a much better impression on a recruiter.

For example, instead of stating, “developed the user interface for meeting software,” you should state, “updated the legacy codebase from Dojo to React to deliver features more quickly.”

Use words like achieved, earned, increased, decreased, modernized, and resolved.

When adding another impact statement to your work experience, it’s important to make it feel unique. You should try to use different action words for each statement.

Tip #2: Adding data

Tip two is to quantify your impact statements wherever possible by adding data.

For example, instead of stating, “refactored the login component to make the join process more performant,” you could state, “refactored the login component to reduce the join process from 3 seconds to 0.5 seconds.”

By stating actual data, your statements will have a much higher impact.

Tip #3: Avoid using personal pronouns

Tip three is to avoid using personal pronouns such as I or me. So instead of stating, “I trained two new developers,” simply state, “quickly onboarded two new developers “and mentored them during their first development sprint.”

Lastly, avoid summarizing what your company does. You are the applicant for this job so your resume should focus on you and your work, not the company and their work.

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Conclusion

Work experience is one of the most important sections on your tech resume. Knowing what and how to put it in your resume will help you land an interview with the company of your dreams.

Always state the impact over responsibilities and quantify this impact where possible.

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Thanks for reading. Check out my latest resume to see how I put my work experience there.