63 Examples of Professional Experience

John Spacey, August 21, 2021

Professional experience is experience that is relevant to a prospective role or position. This is mostly synonymous with work experience but potentially includes things like research projects as a student or volunteering. The following are common examples of professional experience followed by more detailed examples.

Administration	Attention to Detail
Budget Control	Business Analysis
Change Management	Closing Sales
Coaching / Training	Communication & Reporting
Compassion	Computing & Coding
Cost Reduction	Creativity, Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Customer Relationships	Customer Service
Decision Making	Design / Redesign
Diligence	Employee Relations
Going Beyond the Call of Duty	Improving Customer Experience
Improving a Business Metric	Influencing Management
Information Security	Investor Relations
Knowledge Development	Launching Products
Leading Initiatives	Managing Teams
New Markets	Optimizing Marketing
Optimizing Products	Organizing Events
Outcomes	Partnerships
Passion & Resolve	People & Planet
Planning	Problem Solving
Process Automation / Optimization	Productivity -- Timely Completion of Work
Professional Ethics	Professionalism
Project Proposals	Projects
Public Relations	Public Speaking
Purchasing	Quality Assurance / Control
Reliability	Research
Revenue Generation	Risk Management
Self-Direction & Initiative	Solving Customer Problems
Solving Technical Problems	Sponsoring Change
Stakeholder Management	Strategy
Sustainability & Resilience	Team Culture
Teamwork	Upselling / Cross-selling
Work Quality

Detailed Examples

Generally speaking, professional experience focuses on your major contributions in a job. Keep descriptions brief and try to reference a number -- any number. The following are examples of experience.

Coded and launched a payback app that allowed salespeople to calculate the margins on complex deals in the field. Reduced the turnaround time for quotations by 60%.

Managed a $12.3 million infrastructure construction project to schedule and budget.

Delivered friendly and diligent customer service to achieve customer satisfaction of 90%.

Upsold $44,000 in product add-ons in a quarter.

Closed 244 maintenance service calls a month.

Retired a legacy system saving $133,000 in annually recurring maintenance and support costs.

Resolved production outages with a mean-time-to-repair of 12 minutes.

Created a dashboard that gave sales planning a breakdown of a $440 million sales pipeline by stage, product, team and region.

Developed an algorithm to more efficiently predict inventory requirements. Improved sell-through rate by 14%.

Fulfilled 9000 orders a month.

Years of Professional Experience

If you have less than 10 years of experience it is common to list any experience you have that is relevant to a role. Recent roles are typically explained in far more detail than older roles. Beyond 10 years, you can begin to think about listing positions without any detail or dropping them all together. There is no rule here as it all depends on the relevance of your experience to a position. For example, if you have been an electrician for 15 years and have worked at 3 companies in that capacity you may decide to omit older jobs where you were a construction laborer. If you only had one employer in the past 15 years you may decide to list older positions to show that you have worked for multiple firms. Alternatively, if you've had 34 employers in the past 10 years -- it may be a mistake to list all 10 years as this may be perceived negatively.