What is Relevant Experience? Resume Advice for 2023

By Reid - October 5, 2022

Relevant Experience Resume

Have you ever been thrown off by a resume or job application where it asks for your relevant experience? Relevant to what, right?

Fortunately, it’s not as hard as you might think to look like a rock star when describing your relevant experience. This area helps you highlight your best qualifications, no matter what your past professional background looks like.

The following information reveals vital tips for using relevant experience on your resume and within a job application. It also provides examples of relevant experiences to help guide you when writing out your own. Let’s get started!

Questions Answered:

What is relevant experience?
How to identify and use it within your resume
Relevant experience examples

What is Relevant Experience?

Relevant experience refers to work experience or other experiences directly related to the job you are applying for.

For example, if you are applying for a job as a web developer, the relevant experience might include any previous jobs or projects where you developed websites or web applications. It could also have experience with specific programming languages or technologies used in web development.

Employers often look for candidates with relevant experience because it demonstrates that you have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in the role.

Including these experiences on your resume helps hiring managers determine whether you’re a great candidate, even if you don’t yet have deep expertise in their industry.

How to identify the relevant experience and use it within your resume

Several methods exist to discover whether your previous job responsibilities and overall skills match your next desired job.

1. Pull up the job description

Scan the job description and note what it says regarding Job Responsibilities, Desired Skills, and Education Requirements. Putting this to paper aids you with getting a sense of whether you can make yourself look attractive to the employer.

2. Use the Required skills areas

Now dig into the description’s skills and professional experience sections a bit more. Circle anything that matches and cross out any accomplishment, skill, or responsibility that won’t help you get this particular job.

3. Compare qualifications to the job description

Make a chart that reveals all similarities and differences between what the hiring manager wants and what you offer from a skills and experience standpoint.

4. Add to your resume

Next, brainstorm how to re-write your skills and accomplishments to align with the qualifications needed for the position.

You’ll increase your opportunities for advancing through the hiring process if you tailor your resume to the required qualifications and skills.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What If I Don’t Have the Correct Relevant Experience?

Employers emphasize your past achievements and responsibilities more than the exact roles you’ve previously worked.

Let’s assume you want to work as a marketing coordinator, but your only previous job was that camp counselor job you had during college summers.

List how you had to market the various camp programs to parents, persuading them to put their kids into multiple programs, or mention the specific revenue increase you helped the camp achieve.

Avoid leaving out your past education, skills, and professional experiences because you don’t think they apply to the current situation. Instead, advantageously use them as relevant experiences.

Examples of universal experiences that translate into skills you can mold and rephrase to fit well with the job description’s listing include:

Interpersonal skills
Communication skills
Sales skills

Review the requested skills and ask yourself how you can pull from past experiences in unique ways that show employers why you’re the perfect fit, even if you don’t have expertise in their specific field.

What if your Work Experience is in a Different Area?

What if you’re applying for an HR career, but your experience exists in the marketing field? Let’s look at how you might adjust your resume’s professional area to fit the new role more appropriately.

Currently, your resume says that you worked as a marketing specialist running paid ads. The current responsibilities on your resume might say that you:

Strategized client needs with sales and marketing teams
Determined new campaign strategies by doing market research
Monitored social media profiles for clients

The HR position wants candidates to conduct screening interviews, perform recruiting duties, and write relevant job listings. You might adjust your resume to list your past relevant experiences and responsibilities as follows:

Reduced client turnover by 17% by brainstorming unique marketing methods
Improved customer engagement by 13% by writing better copy
Engaged customers via social media

What if your Work Experience is Limited Overall?

If you just graduated from college and can only point to several part-time positions on your resume, you might feel troubled applying for an accountant position. However, you previously worked in a retail store as a sales associate. Your current resume might list your responsibilities as follows:

Helped shoppers learn about products and where to find them
Used a point-of-sale system to process sales transactions
Did inventory counts and restocked items

But that desired accountant job wants its candidates to step in and find financial errors, manage financial transactions, and help with tax preparation responsibilities.

So your new resume might list your responsibilities in this manner to match the accountant role more effectively:

Uncovered order undercharges and overcharges by reviewing invoices
Helped prepare employee tax documents for the owner
Counted each drawer at the beginning and end of every shift

You see in these two examples how customizing your past work experiences and applying them to the new position helps you highlight how relevant those experiences are to what each hiring manager needs to see in new applicants!

Related:

“Lack of confidence during the interview is why 40% of interviewers don’t take a candidate past the first stage.”

— Twin Employment

Wrapping Up | relevant work experience

You’re likely applying for this next position because you see yourself as the perfect fit, even if it’s not readily apparent based on your work history.

The most important task to perform before/while applying to that new opportunity is to prove that you have what it takes to thrive in this role. How do you do that?

By highlighting your relevant experience through past jobs, volunteering, internship, and other forms of professional experience/training.

You have what it takes. Package it up in a way that excites your new employer, and you’ll soon walk into your dream job’s new office. Good luck!

Title: _What is Relevant Experience? Resume Advice for 202_3

Category: Resume Resources

Tags: relevant experience meaning, relevant work experience, how is your previous experience relevant to this role, what is relevant experience, what does relevant experience on a resume mean

Author: Reid is a contributor to theJub. He's an employment and marketing enthusiast who studied business before taking on various recruiting, management, and marketing roles. More from the author. | Author Profile