Work Experience on a Resume: How to Format the Section, With Examples

The experience section is usually the longest part of the resume and the part a hiring manager reads most closely. List positions in reverse chronological order, most recent first, as Texas A&M's career center advises. Each entry has a heading line (title, employer, location, dates) and a set of bullets on what you achieved.

Use your official job title, because employment verification usually confirms title and dates. If the official title is internal jargon, add a plain equivalent in parentheses: "Client Solutions Associate II (Account Manager)". For staffing-agency or contract work, name the agency and the client so your dates match what a background check shows: "Accounts Payable Specialist, Apex Staffing (assigned to Harbor Foods)".

Write dates the same way in every entry. Texas A&M uses month and year to month and year, with "Present" for a current job. The U.S. Treasury's federal resume guidance asks for start and end dates including the month and year, plus the number of hours you worked per week.

Cover the last 10 to 15 years in detail. Job-search guidance republished by Penn Career Services notes that career experts often advise leaving out jobs dating back more than 10 or 15 years. Older work rarely reflects the tools, scope and level you are applying at now.

That is a default, not a rule. If a posting asks for 20 years in a field and you have them, show them. If an older job is still relevant (you ran a restaurant before moving into corporate operations, say), list it in a section titled "Additional experience" with the title and employer and no bullets. Federal resumes have a hard limit: the Treasury says federal agencies only accept resumes up to two pages and tells applicants to remove or deprioritize outdated or unrelated experience.

Students work the other way: keep high school jobs while they are your best evidence. The University of Wisconsin-Madison education career center says that by the second or third year of college, high school experience is likely outdated or irrelevant. Our guide on how far back a resume should go covers each career stage in more detail.

You can, but it usually backfires. Dates are how an employer reads your career: how long you stayed, whether you moved up, and whether you meet a "3+ years" requirement. An undated resume makes the reader guess, and a reader who has to guess tends to assume a gap or a short stint.

People remove dates for two reasons, a gap or their age, and both have better fixes. For age, drop jobs older than about 15 years and remove a graduation year from long ago. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects applicants who are 40 or older, according to the EEOC, but nothing requires you to volunteer your age. For a gap, keep the dates and explain it in one line or in your cover letter.

Years only ("2019 to 2023") is acceptable for older roles and keeps the layout clean. Keep months on recent jobs: the Penn article points out that omitting months can conceal important context, and "2023 to 2024" could mean 2 months or 23. Federal applications always need the month and year.

Write the employer name once, then stack each title you held under it with its own dates, most recent first. Advancement is visible at a glance and the company does not appear twice. Harvard Law School's guidance for two jobs at one employer is the same idea: enter both jobs under one header, with each title in italics.

Give the current title most of the bullets and keep one to three on the earlier title, focused on what earned the promotion. If the duties barely changed (Analyst I to Analyst II), use a single entry with both titles and a bullet that names the promotion: "Promoted to Analyst II after 14 months, ahead of the standard 24-month track."

Transfers and rebrands work the same way. If you moved between locations of one company, list the employer once and give each role its city. After a merger or a name change, use the current name with the old one in parentheses so your dates still line up with employment records.

No. Experience is experience whether or not you were paid. Penn Career Services tells students to include everything relevant, "whether you were an employee, intern, volunteer, researcher, or member of a team." The Treasury's federal guidance also asks applicants to include relevant volunteer work and community roles that show how they qualify.

List the role with an accurate title ("Marketing Intern", "Volunteer Grant Writer") and describe it like any other job. You do not need to label it unpaid, because the title already tells the truth, but never present it as a paid staff position you did not hold. On a federal resume, give volunteer roles the same month-and-year dates and hours per week as paid jobs.

If unpaid work is your strongest experience, keep it under one "Experience" heading in date order. If it sits beside a long paid career, a separate "Volunteer experience" section keeps the paid timeline easy to read.

Widen what counts and name the section to fit. "Experience" or "Relevant experience" can hold babysitting, lawn care, tutoring, a family business, school clubs, sports leadership, volunteering, research and class projects. Penn suggests general headings such as "Experience" or "Leadership & Extracurriculars" for exactly this reason.

Write those entries the way you would write a job: a title, the organization, dates and two to four bullets with something measurable. "Babysitter, self-employed, Jun 2024 to Present: care for 3 children ages 4 to 9 for two families, about 12 hours a week" reads like experience because it is.

High school students can put Education (GPA, relevant courses, honors) near the top, then Experience, then Skills, all on one page. Our guides to a resume with no experience, a high school resume and a first-job resume have full templates.

List concurrent jobs as separate entries with their real, overlapping dates. A reader who sees two jobs held at once reads it as reliability. Put the more relevant one first when the start dates are close.

Group short contract or gig work under one heading, such as "Freelance Bookkeeper, self-employed, 2022 to 2024", with bullets that name typical clients and volume. For a stint of a few months, the Penn article notes you can leave it off, as long as you are ready to explain the gap if someone asks.

1. 1

   List every relevant role

   Paid jobs, internships, volunteer work, freelance projects and leadership roles from about the last 10 to 15 years.

2. 2

   Put them in order

   Most recent first. Group promotions and transfers under one employer.

3. 3

   Write each heading line

   Title, employer, city and state, and month-and-year dates in one consistent format.

4. 4

   Add bullets

   Three to five per recent job, each starting with an action verb and ending with a result or a sense of scale. Fewer for older roles.

5. 5

   Trim to fit

   Cut bullets on old or unrelated roles before you shrink the font. One page for students and early career, two for most experienced candidates.

6. 6

   Check against the posting

   Make sure the titles, tools and duties the employer asks for appear in your most recent entries.

Layouts for fictional careers. Stack titles when the jobs differed; use one entry when they did not.

Entries for fictional high school and college students. Numbers are illustrations.

• How Far Back Should a Resume Go?
• How to Write a Resume With No Work Experience
• How to Explain an Employment Gap on a Resume, With Examples
• Volunteer Work on a Resume: How to List It, With Examples
• Resume Bullet Points: How Many to Use and How to Write Them
• Reverse chronological resume

We opened every page below on that date. Pay, rules and requirements change, so check the source before you rely on a detail.

1. Texas A&M University Career Center: Resume (graduate students) (reverse chronological order; month and year dates; "present" for current roles)
2. U.S. Department of the Treasury: Tips for Building an Effective Resume (federal resumes: month-and-year dates, hours per week, volunteer work, two-page limit)
3. Penn Career Services, University of Pennsylvania: Write a Resume/CV (include employee, intern, volunteer and team experience; general section headings)
4. Penn Career Services (republished from Idealist Careers): Jobseeker Tips: Should Your Resume Include Employment Dates? (10 to 15 years; omitting months conceals context; short stints)
5. Harvard Law School, Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising: Resume Layout Guidance (two jobs at one employer under one header)
6. University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Career Center: Writing a Resume (when high school experience becomes outdated; volunteer positions as experience)
7. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Age Discrimination (ADEA protects people age 40 or older, including in hiring)