How to write work experience on a CV, including gaps

Work experience is the section that decides the outcome. Everything above it exists to get it read; everything below it is supporting material. Yet most CVs spend it describing the job rather than the person who did it.

The shape of one role

Job title — the market's term, with the internal one in brackets if they differ. Employer — name, and one clause of context if the company is not famous: "a 40-person logistics firm". Location — city is enough. Dates — month and year, same format for every role. Three to six bullets — the achievements, most relevant first.

Repeat for each role, most recent first, with a visible gap between blocks.

Turning responsibilities into achievements

Start with the duty, then ask three questions: what was the scale, what did I change, and what would have gone wrong without me?

Duty: managing the team rota. Scale: 14 staff, three shift patterns, a seasonal peak. Change: cut agency cover spend by 22% by cross-training four staff. Result: "Built and ran the rota for 14 staff across three shifts, cross-training four people in the peak process to cut agency cover spend by 22%."

Duty: answering customer complaints. Achievement: "Resolved an average of 40 escalated complaints a week, writing the template responses that cut repeat contacts by a third."

Where you have no number, use a consequence or a first: the system you introduced, the process you wrote, the client you kept.

Which roles to include

Last ten to fifteen years in detail. Older roles get one line each — title, employer, dates — or are dropped entirely if they add nothing. A role from 2004 with four bullet points pushes your current job up the page and wastes a reader's attention.

Exceptions: if an old role contains your only experience of something the advert asks for, keep a single line for it. If you changed sectors recently, keep more of the previous sector to show the depth behind you.

Employment gaps

State them. A labelled gap is unremarkable; an unlabelled one is a question the reader fills in themselves, usually unkindly.

One line under the dates is enough:

• Career break — full-time caring for a parent, 2022–2023.
• Study leave — completed a CIPD Level 5 qualification.
• Redundancy — role eliminated when the site closed; took a temporary contract while searching.

If you did anything at all in the gap — freelance work, volunteering, a course, caring — name it. It converts an absence into a fact.

Job-hopping and short tenures

Two or three short roles in a row invite the question. Answer it in the summary rather than waiting for the interview: "Three contract roles in 2023–24 after a company restructure; now looking for a permanent position." Then let the achievements do the rest.

Achievements, not adjectives

"Hard-working and reliable" is an opinion. "Never missed a month-end close in four years" is a fact. Recruiters are trained to ignore the first and remember the second.

A useful discipline: at the end of each bullet, ask "so what?" If you cannot answer it, the bullet is a duty and needs either a result or deletion.

The ten-minute rewrite

Take your current role and list everything you did last month. Now, for each item, write what happened because you did it — the number, the time saved, the problem that stopped. Most people find two or three genuinely strong achievements hiding in a list of routine work.

If the rewriting is the part you keep putting off, run the CV through the improver: it rebuilds each bullet around the outcomes already in your text, shows you the result free, and charges from £0.99 only if you want to download it.