At Grantham University, we believe your education doesn’t have to stop with your degree. That’s why we offer online help for the job-hunting process—from interview prep to putting together the perfect resume. Recently, three of Grantham University’s Career Launch experts got together for a series of podcasts about helping students and graduates reach their career goals.
Here are some of the highlights of the podcast covering how to ensure the experience section of your resume—the area hiring managers review first—is as good as it can be.
The First Thing Reviewed: Your Work Experience
Name. Check. Contact information. Check. Work experience … this should be triple checked.
“It’s the first section hiring managers will review,” says Doug Dimler. “Everything else is not irrelevant, it’s just that they’ll go to this section first to make sure things are the way they should be.”
Whether you title it “Work Experience,” “Professional Experience,” “Relevant Experience” or some other name, it needs to clearly define your knowledge, involvement and, yes, experience in an industry and in specific jobs and career paths in that industry. What’s more, everything you put in this section should be relevant to the job you’re applying for now.
Career Trajectory
In your ‘Work Experience’ section, you’re going to also give potential employers a snapshot of your career trajectory or progression. In other words, how you’ve moved from entry-level jobs into positions of more responsibility—it’s a demonstration of how you’ve grown and matured in your desired career field. With that in mind, present your information in a reverse chronological order.
“If you’ve stayed at one job and you’ve progressed in one job,” says Dimler, “you want to put those dates on there so a hiring manager can clearly see that you’ve gone from one job to another, how long you’ve been in that job and see if you’ve progressed. Same thing if you’ve had multiple jobs.”
“The experience section is really the heart of your resume,” says Brandon McAuley. “If you begin doing this section of your resume first, the rest of your resume will be a little easier to write … this is really the story of what you’ve actually accomplished in your position.”
Action Words
As you begin writing your experience, use action verbs to reveal details of your position. (Google ‘keywords’ or ‘action words’ for resumes to get some help on what words to use.) Be specific. Be action oriented. And be current.
“There are some action verbs that are overly used or even old,” says Dimler, “that you shouldn’t use. If you use those ‘old’ action verbs, it makes your resume dated, and you definitely don’t want that.”
Make sure they aren’t old, out-of-date or overly used action words. These can hurt your resume. Avoid repeating the same action words (I provided…, I performed…, I provided… and I performed…) over and over again. And avoid using clichés like:

Responsible for
People Person
Self-Starter

Tense Situations
Make sure your work history and experience match up tenses with current and past positions.
“A common error that I’ve seen on resumes is not aligning your tenses properly,” says Bell. “And what I mean by that is moving from ‘served’ to ‘serves’ and ‘led’ to ‘leading’ when you’re talking about your current job versus a previous position.”
How Much Experience to Share
One concern resume writers bring up is exactly how far back should they go when reporting work history, especially if they have years and years of experience.”
“Ten to 15 years is a good number,” says Jeromey Bell, “but if you go any further back than that you might get into positions that might not be as relevant to the task [or position] at hand. It’s information that just may not be important on the document.”
“Especially in technical or IT fields,” says Dimler. “Anything over 10 years, any languages that you’ve learned, even any tasks that you’ve done, just might be obsolete.”
One other thing, if you’re looking at leadership roles, don’t dw