Work Experience

For people who have been working for a while now, this section is the most important and is the meat of your resume. In most cases, this section would take up half the length or more of your resume, hence you should pay the most attention to this section. For college students without much internship experience, if you have significant projects, the Projects section could take up as much space as the Work Experience section.

The goal of this section is to show that your value to future employers through how you contributed significantly to your existing/past company's business goals. Each working experience should contain the role/title, company name, start/end date, and a list of accomplishments/responsibilities in bullet points.

The most common mistake people make here is to not elaborate on their experiences and achievements. Many people trade stocks, how do you differentiate between a normal retail investor and Warren Buffet? It's in the scale and the outcomes. Elaborate on your experiences and achievements sufficiently to convey the scale, complexity, and impact.

Recommendations

✅ Use bullet points

Using bullet points and keeping your points brief helps you to save space and focus on the main points. List down your impact as bullet points in a concise manner.

✅ Use Google's XYZ formula

Write your bullet points according to this format: "Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].". Replaced the first word with a power verbs listed in the General section where appropriate.

Meh example:

Built the checkout pages of the e-commerce portal in a team

Impressive example:

Led development of an optimized checkout flow which boasts a conversion rate of 5%, resulting in an ARR of $10M by working with in a cross-functional team of 4 and doing extensive A/B testing.

✅ Demonstrate impact according to your seniority

You should try to convey the complexity and scope of your work. This is especially important if you are going for senior roles and have fewer actual years of experience than the standard for the role. Hiring managers will be more convinced you are up for the job if you have prior experience at your current company.

Here's a quick reference guide:

• Junior (0 - 2 years of experience)
  • Examples of tasks and features completed.
  • Examples of good engineering in your work.
• Mid (3 - 6 years of experience)
  • Examples of medium to large features completed independently.
  • Works with cross-functional partners to drive features to completion.
• Senior (7 - 12 years of experience)
  • Examples of projects or systems completed through your technical leadership.
  • Strong owner of significant projects/systems.
  • Identifies problems, develop solutions and drive them to resolution independently.
  • Mentored others and helped them to improve.
• Staff and beyond (13+ years of experience):
  • Examples of major initiatives led and/or huge systems that had measurable impact on teams/organizations.
  • Cares about the business and solves business problems through engineering.
  • Defined engineering direction and improved the engineering culture in the team/organization.
  • Helped with recruiting, onboarding, mentoring new members into the team/organization.
  • Resource: https://staffeng.com

✅ Quantify impact and achievements

Numbers help with justifying impact. Non-exhaustive ways to quantify achievements:

• Business impact
  • Number of users (total/daily/monthly)
  • Cost/time saved per day/week
  • Revenue generated (make sure it is not sensitive information)
  • Reduction in customer complaints/support tickets filed
  • Reduced resources/execution time needed
  • Increased resolution rate (%)
  • Delivered ahead of schedule by X weeks/months
  • Exceeded goals of X metric by Y%
• Technical complexity
  • Queries per second
  • Number of pages in the website/feature built, what they were
  • Number of files/lines of code written
  • Number of files/lines of code refactored
  • Testing
    • Number of different scenarios covered
    • Test coverage improvement
    • Test framework used
  • Data set
    • Number of rows
    • Size of data set
  • Artificial intelligence and Machine learning
    • Accuracy of algorithms/models
• Cross-functional complexity
  • Number of teams/people involved in the project
  • Number of teams/people led
  • Project used by X engineers/people across Y teams
• Mentorship
  • Number of people mentored, in which mentorship areas
• Others
  • Selected as ...
  • Received the X award

✅ Include technologies

Technologies used at work weigh more heavily than technologies listed in your skills as you are likely to have spent more time using that technology and as a result, more familiar with it.

✅ Give examples

Giving concrete examples of past work is a way of demonstrating the scope and complexity of the work.

Common Mistakes

❌ Being overly generic

We've seen resumes which mention "Collaborated with team members using version control systems (e.g. Git) to plan work and allocate tasks." This is overly generic and expected of every engineer these days. Saying this doesn't add much value to the resume at all.

❌ Don't include unimportant things done at work

Such as organizing offsite or social events for your team.

Examples