How to describe work experience on a resume.

1. Duties vs outcomes

Here is a typical customer service resume bullet:

Responsible for handling customer calls and resolving complaints.

That bullet is a job description. It tells the reader what task was in front of you, not what you did with it. Here's the same work described as an outcome:

Handled an average of 45 inbound calls per day with a 92% first-contact resolution rate, consistently ranking in the top three on a team of twelve.

The second version tells the reader three things the first didn't: the volume, the quality outcome, and your relative performance. That's what a hiring manager wants to know.

You don't always need numbers. But you do need to shift the framing from "what was in the job" to "what you did inside it."

2. Start with a real verb

Every bullet should start with a specific verb. Avoid "Responsible for" and "Helped with" entirely — they're passive and vague. Good lead verbs include:

• Built / Designed / Wrote / Shipped — for creating things.
• Led / Coordinated / Mentored / Trained — for working with people.
• Reduced / Improved / Cut / Increased — for changes to metrics.
• Migrated / Replaced / Rebuilt — for transitions.
• Launched / Delivered / Owned — for shipping outcomes.

Avoid verbs that pad without informing: "assisted", "supported", "participated in", "involved in", "facilitated". These often appear because the writer isn't sure what their actual contribution was. Try to be specific about what you actually did.

3. Using metrics honestly

Numbers make bullets credible — when they're accurate and you can explain them. When they're inflated, they are worse than no numbers, because a hiring manager who asks about the number in an interview will catch it immediately.

Good metrics answer one of these questions:

• How much? — revenue, cost, users, students, transactions.
• How many? — team size, accounts, tickets, customers, projects.
• How fast? — time saved, turnaround, launch speed.
• How good? — retention, satisfaction, quality, error rate.
• How much relative? — percent change, ranking within a team.

If you genuinely don't remember a number, use one of these:

• Range: "reduced processing time from about 20 minutes to under 5."
• Relative: "cut the error rate by roughly a third."
• Scale: "across a team of eight people over two quarters."
• Comparison: "the highest customer satisfaction score on the team that quarter."

Any of these is honest if it reflects what actually happened. What's not honest is inventing a precise percentage for something you never tracked.

4. What if you have no metrics?

Some work genuinely doesn't produce numbers, or the numbers aren't accessible to you. That's fine. Describe the outcome in plain language instead of forcing a fake metric.

Examples for work that resists numbers:

• Taught secondary English → "Designed and delivered a full year English curriculum for three Grade 10 classes, including original assessments and a writing workshop unit that became a template for the department."
• Nursed in ICU → "Provided continuous care for up to four ICU patients per shift, including ventilator management, family communication, and coordination with the on-call physician."
• Handled administrative work → "Owned scheduling for a 15-person team, including meeting coordination, travel arrangements, and vendor communication."

Notice that each bullet describes something concrete (a curriculum, a patient load, a team size) without pretending to quantify an outcome that isn't quantifiable.

5. Show scope and complexity

A quiet way to make a bullet stronger is to describe the scale at which you worked. "Wrote the documentation" is weak. "Wrote documentation for a public API used by 300+ external developers" is strong — even without a specific outcome metric.

Scope details you can add honestly:

• Team size and structure (e.g. "worked with a team of 6 backend developers and 2 designers").
• Number of clients, customers, students, or patients.
• Budget size.
• Geographic or organisational reach.
• Timeframe or frequency.

6. Examples from real fields

Software development

Weak: "Worked on the payments service."

Strong: "Rebuilt the checkout flow to remove a race condition affecting about 0.8% of orders; cut payment failures by 40% over the first three months after launch."

Marketing

Weak: "Managed social media accounts."

Strong: "Grew a client's Instagram following from 4k to 27k over 9 months by shifting from weekly posts to a daily, video-led content calendar. Engagement rate rose from 1.2% to 4.8%."

Teaching

Weak: "Taught Grade 10 mathematics."

Strong: "Introduced problem-based learning units for two Grade 10 mathematics classes; average end-of-term scores rose by roughly half a grade compared to the previous year's cohort."

Project management

Weak: "Coordinated cross-team projects."

Strong: "Led a 22-person cross-functional launch of a new customer portal across five teams and three time zones; delivered on the original timeline after absorbing a two-week delay to the payments integration."

Customer support

Weak: "Answered customer questions."

Strong: "Handled an average of 60 live-chat conversations per shift at a 94% satisfaction score; rewrote the FAQ top ten articles, reducing repeat contacts on those topics by about a third."

7. How many bullets per role

For most resumes: three to five bullets for the most recent role, two to three for previous roles, and one or two for roles older than ten years (if you include them at all). Your most recent role deserves the most space because it's most relevant to what you'll do next.

If a role was short or less relevant, one strong bullet is better than three weak ones. Use less space, not less quality.

8. Final checklist

• Does every bullet start with a specific action verb?
• Does at least half of your bullets describe an outcome or a scale, not just a task?
• Are all metrics accurate and defensible if asked in an interview?
• Have you cut every "Responsible for" and "Helped with"?
• Does each role have between two and five bullets depending on relevance?
• Can a stranger read each bullet and understand the work without any other context?