1. What Did You Accomplish or Achieve?
Employers are looking for results. They also want to get a sense of whether you take the initiative, or just do what you're told. This is the place to show that you're a go getter. Remember to quantify or qualify whatever it is you accomplished. If you're drawing blanks, try asking yourself the following questions: What distinguishes you from your colleagues? Are you ever consistently praised by your boss for the way you perform certain tasks? Do your co workers ask for your advice or opinion about how to carry out certain projects? Have you been designated to train new employees in certain procedures? Have you made any recommendations to your boss that have been adopted or put into use? Have any of your ideas regarding policy or procedure been implemented?
2. What Were Your Major Responsibilities?
In other words, what did you do all day long? For some reason it is easy for people to talk about their jobs, but when it comes to writing about them it's like pulling teeth. If this is true for you, then I suggest that you talk first and write later. Keep a little tape recorder handy to record your thoughts as they occur to you. Later you can translate your thoughts into prose. As much as possible, try to indicate how well you performed your job responsibilities. If you just list the duties of your position, your description will be dull and lifeless and the reader will fall asleep. But don't take this to mean that you can indiscriminately throw adjectives and numbers all over the place. Use modifiers prudently.
3. What New Skills or Knowledge Did You Acquire?
This is particularly relevant for describing an internship or volunteer experience where you primarily played the role of apprentice. While you may not have had many major job responsibilities, you nonetheless developed new abilities, improved your skills, and learned the ins and outs of a new field. This is nothing to sneeze at. The mere fact that you received in depth exposure to a field, and were able to interact with professionals in that field on a regular basis, is enough to make an employer take you seriously. After all, you are now familiar with the territory, the lingo, and the culture of that field.
In describing an internship or volunteer experience, you might want to mention that you attended staff meetings, observed experienced professionals at work, learned how the organization operates, became fluent in the jargon of the field, and provided administrative and technical support to staff, management, and executives. The point is to show that you have been groomed and trained to join the ranks of the professionals.
4. What Qualifies as Experience?
Just about anything can be considered experience. You can include full time, part time, seasonal employment, volunteer work, internships, consulting, free lancing, military service, raising children, and extracurricular activities. Just make sure that the employer understands the capacity in which you were employed. You wouldn't want someone to think that you were a full time staff member when in fact you were volunteering five hours a week. In any case, the issue is not whether you were paid, but rather what you accomplished through your efforts.
5. Which Information Should You Include?
At the bare minimum you need to include the name of your employer, the employer's location (city and state, or country if it's overseas), your job title, dates of employment, and a description of what you achieved. You might also want to include the name of the division or department within the organization, if it's relevant, as well as a brief description of the organization. What products or services does it provide? How large is it? Is it domestic or international?
Presentation
Although there's no doubt that employers prefer bulleted job descriptions, keep in mind that bullets generally take up quite a bit more space than paragraphs. If you do use bullets, you might want to try a theme oriented approach in which each bullet addresses a particular skill area. For example, all of your accomplishments pertaining to customer service would be clustered together beside one bullet. Such an approach enables you to avoid listing only one accomplishment per line. It's also a good idea to leave a smidgen of space between each bulleted statement so that when viewed as a group they don't appear to be one big blob.
What's in a Title?
Job titles tend to be fairly meaningless. Some give an inflated sense of the job, and others grossly underestimate it. If you feel your title doesn't do you justice, you may want to omit it or modify it slightly to make it more accurate. For example, if your official title is Grade 3 Filing Clerk, but you really do the job of an Administrative Assistant, then go ahead and call yourself an Administrative Assistant. Just make sure you're honest with the employer if they ask for your official title on an interview or job application. For those of you who are self employed, you can either list "self employed" or "free lance" for your title, or list the names of a few of your major clients. It's probably not a good idea to list yourself as the president of your company if it's a one person outfit. Keep in mind that employers are sometimes suspect of applicants who have already gone into business for themselves. They worry that such people may be too independent minded and will not be able to work as part of a team. To avert the employer's apprehension, you may want to tone down some of your entrepreneurial activities.
