How to fill out your work experience

List your relevant work, including any federal work experience.

You can add and store up to 50 separate work experience entries. If you want to add more, you'll have to delete an existing entry.

Your work experience

For each work experience, include:

• Employer's name
• Employer's address
• Your job title
• Start and end date
• Your duties, skills and accomplishments

You can also include (but aren't required to include):

• Salary
• Currency of your salary
• Salary rate (is it bi-weekly, monthly, yearly, etc?)
• Average hours per week you worked
• Whether or not we can contact your supervisor

What if I don't want my current federal employer to see my resume?

If you make your resume searchable, federal HR specialists and hiring managers can search and see your resume and profile. However, any work experience with an end date of “Present” will not be searchable or visible to these recruiters.

How do I answer “Is this a Federal Civilian position”?

Federal experience includes positions you've held as a civilian employee paid by a federal agency.

Federal experience does NOT include any position as an active duty military member or a private contractor of the U.S. government.

If you answer ‘yes', you'll see additional fields for the department and agency, series, pay scale, grade and appointment type.

What do I include in the duties, accomplishments and skills section?

Describing your duties, accomplishments and skills can be challenging. Here are a few tips:

Focus on your goals

Highlight the skills you possess, and how they relate to the field you want to enter and the job(s) you're seeking. Think about your career goals. Then narrow your scope to the positions that will further those goals. Once your career goals are clear, it'll be easier to describe your skills in a meaningful way.

Review job announcements

Review relevant job descriptions to get an understanding of the requirements for the jobs you're interested in. Then, relate those requirements to your own experience—list your matching skills, experience, training, and education. Use words and phrases from the job announcement(s) and include other commonly used technical terms.

Describe your experience

Always include your current position, however only list past work experiences that show how your skills and duties relate to the type of job you're seeking. Think about the projects you've worked on; what your specific duties were; what you needed to know to do the job; the tools, software, or equipment you used and what you accomplished.

Include achievements and contributions

Did you ever have to list your accomplishments for performance reviews? If so, you can use those documents as a guide. If not, try listing your accomplishments from the last five years. Focus on challenges you met, problems you solved, results achieved, and any awards, promotions, and special benefits you received. It's better to describe your accomplishments, than list your responsibilities.

Follow these writing tips

Keep your description concise, clear and organized. Use simple sentences that cite specific examples. Name any tool, software, or equipment you used, and any specialized knowledge you acquired.

Example

Don't say

‘Performed the full range of project management duties for a new information system,'

Do say (using concrete examples)

‘Used Microsoft Project to develop timelines. Prepared budget requests; hired staff; selected vendors; negotiated contracts; designed and implemented a new UNIX client-server information system.'

Use action word phrases, such as:

• Designed and implemented new organizational structure plan.
• Negotiated contracts up to 90K.
• Delivered report on waste management.

When you're finished, ask yourself the following questions:

• Would someone who's not familiar with my occupational background understand the kind of work I do?
• Is there nonessential information (nice to have, but not helpful in meeting mandatory qualification requirements) in what I have written?
• Have I omitted any relevant experience or skills I possess that might distinguish me from other candidates if my resume reaches the desk of a selecting official?
• Have I adequately described major characteristics of my occupation or background and skills that are most common to my occupation?