Make your experience work for you

Recent grads and career changers often lack enough relevant experience. But make the most of what you’ve got to attract employers.

Don’t rule anything out
Just because it was unpaid or low-paid doesn’t mean you can’t include it in your work history section. Include all of the following, if relevant, to the job you’re applying for:

- internships
You can include these in a separate section, or in your main work history section, depending on what other types of experience you have.

- PhD and graduate research
If you’ve done industry-related research which is directly relevant to the role, include it. Although you’ll also have the dates of your studies in your education section, pull out the periods of time that you spent researching, and put them in either an Industry Research section, or a Work Experience section (depending on how / where you conducted your research). Make it clear how your research findings are of interest to the role, organisation, or sector.

- voluntary or unpaid work
If you learned something, or achieved something, it doesn’t matter if you were paid for it or not. As long as you can demonstrate the relevance of voluntary or unpaid work, keep it in your work history section.

- entrepreneurial ventures
In a blog post for the Guardian, I wrote about the different ways graduates can get experience without doing an internship. Getting a project off the ground proves two in-demand attributes: resourcefulness and tenacity; and even if you didn’t make much money from your venture, you’ll have learned valuable lessons about how businesses work.

- summer jobs / retail work
Grads sometimes worry that this type of work will be sniffed at by potential employers. But “survival jobs” – the ones you take because you need the money – are very often valuable for what they teach you. Yes, it’s humbling to serve customers in a shop, but you’ll have learned good interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills, and how to win repeat business. In any case, in times of recession, no employer is going to sneer at you for taking a job to pay the bills, save up for a training course, or to pay back debts. If you can show you were good at them, keep them on your CV.

Make your successes speak for themselves
When you write about your work experience, concentrate on one of two things:
- what you learned
- what you achieved.

The key to making your work experience stand out is the ability to put it in perspective for the employer. Success stories – where you show how the actions you took impacted on business – allow the employer to visualise you doing the same for his / her company.

Don’t use vague, cliche terms to describe your skills and achievements, but demonstrate them through concrete, factual statements.
“Excellent communication skills” is meaningless. Better is “Supervised a team of customer-support staff”, as you’re saying how you used your communication skills. But much more relevant and appealing would be to describe exactly what you did: “Trained three customer-support staff to solve problems promptly, increasing customer satisfaction levels.” Or “Increased customer satisfaction rates (by X%) through training three customer-support staff to resolve problems promptly.”

More specific or technical skills required for the job (financial, leadership, scientific skills etc) can be put in a Technical Skills / Key Strengths / Core Competencies section near the top of your CV.

Choose carefully
The more you know about the job you’re applying for, the easier it is to decide what aspects of your experience to include in your CV. Research the role, company and sector thoroughly to target your CV as closely as possible. Work out what the job requires, then find matching skills, qualifications or experience to demonstrate you can do the job.

Don’t worry too much about length of experience
You can group internships together under one heading if they have all been short-term. For example, you could write Internships as a heading, with the names of some of the leading companies either in brackets afterwards, or as part of the same heading. Put the combined dates of all your internships next to your heading in smaller font.

You can also group together types of work (retail / hospitality / research) in the same way.

Photo credit: nadya peek