Key Language for Your Work Experience Section

Hello everyone and welcome back to the third module of Build Your Professional ePortfolio in English. Now that we’ve covered the education part, in this lesson we are going to give you valuable information on how to write the professional experience section of your resume. Just like the education section, your professional experience is also presented as a series of bullet points with your job titles, the organization you worked for, and the duration of your employment. In addition, your professional experience section includes a more detailed list with the tasks you’ve completed while holding your job. The format of this part should look something like this. We’re going to talk about how to write each of these parts in this lesson. Let’s start by recalling some job title word endings we learned in our first lesson. Does the sentence contain a job title? No, this sentence does not contain a job title. It contains the field accounting rather than the job title accountant. What about this next sentence? For a complete list of job titles, please see resources. The second step is to choose your level of experience for your job title. Those job titles can change a little depending on your experience. When you first start out in a job, your job title might have the word intern or trainee in it. An intern or trainee means that a person is beginning in the field and may not be getting paid to do the job. Let’s say a person is working in the field of electrical engineering and he is in the last year of college. His job title might be electrical engineering intern or electrical engineering trainee. Because he is volunteering at a company to gain professional experience. If you’re a level above an intern, you can use words such as entry level or junior. They mean that you probably have education but not experience. At this level, your job title will look like entry level software developer, or junior software developer. As you get more experience, your job title typically changes. And you might see word such as senior, principal, or lead in your title. Some people work for a company, but they are self-employed. Their job title usually has the words contract or freelance in it. As in, contract software developer or freelance software developer. Obviously, job titles change for certain professions like medicine. If you are in the field of medicine, you will need to know some other set of words that describe titles. Here’s some titles we use in America for nurses. This may be a little hard, but try and guess which one has the most experience, a student nurse, a registered nurse, a nurse practitioner? If you guessed a nurse practitioner, you’re correct. In America, you have to be a registered nurse for several years before you can become a nurse practitioner. Whichever field you’re in, applying the level experience to your job titles helps make your work experience be more specific and accurate. And also shows your expertise and understanding of your field. Let’s now turn to how we’re going to add your specific tasks during your work experience. To write about them, let’s use Kate, a senior project manager, as an example and help her complete her resume. We’ll start by adding Kate’s accomplishments with action verbs. Starting with an action verb shows what you’ve completed in a direct and clear way. As a senior project manager, one of Kate’s tasks might look like this, managed a team of 10 people. Another way to write about your accomplishments is to show how much impact you had. To do this, we will need to use verbs that indicate change, such as changed, modified, improved, or increased. For Kate, her impactful accomplishment could look like this. Increased sales by 5%. At other times, you may have made big changes for the company. You can use verbs like overhauled, reorganized, restructured, revamped or redesigned. For example Kate, may have completely changed how her team operated to achieve projects. This accomplishment will show up on her resume like this. Restructured workflow for team projects. When choosing the verbs make sure that you use the right form of the verb. In our example with Kate, she worked as a Senior Project Manager in the past. So, that is why we used the past tense form managed, increased, restructured. However, if you still have the job, you want to use the ing form of the verb like managing a team of ten people Now let’s review. In this lesson we’ve learned how to write about our professional experience in our resumes. We’ve learned that writing our professional experience involves choosing the right job title. The right level of experience for that job title, such as, intern or senior. Choosing the right action verb and writing them in the correct form, such as managed or managing. In our next and final module, we’re going to learn how to network with other professionals. Until then, apply what you’ve learned from this module to make sure you update your resume and make it look professional. I look forward to seeing your improved resumes. Have a great day.