Use it or lose it: why you should keep notes on your work experience

Keep track of the skills you gain through vacation jobs, work experience placements and part-time work, as you’ll need to give concrete examples in your graduate job applications.

When you apply for graduate jobs you’ll need to illustrate your skills with practical examples. Your vacation jobs, work experience placements and part-time work will have provided you with plenty of these, but if you don’t record them in detail at the time, you won’t be able to make the most of them when you’re trying to sell yourself to employers later.

If you have a list of examples to hand, filling in graduate job applications and preparing CVs and covering letters will be easier, faster and less daunting. If you look through your work experience skills evidence list the night before your interview you won’t find yourself tongue-tied when asked to recall examples of when you’ve successfully communicated an idea or demonstrated initiative in improving a situation or process.

Keep the STAR approach in mind when you make notes: record the Situation you faced or the Task you had to complete, the Actions you took, and the Results you achieved. The STAR method is a good way of presenting evidence about yourself in your applications, and if you use it to help you structure and record your work experience your information will be in a format that’s ready to use.

Ten points to note about your work experience

The name and details of your work experience provider, plus the dates your time there started and finished.
Your job title and role. Record your responsibilities and key tasks you're given.
The hard skills you use. Computing/office software skills, language skills and so on.
Soft skills. Examples from your work that show off core competences such as communication, teamwork, problem solving, analysis, commercial awareness and leadership.
What you learn on the job. Any job-specific training you receive. Insights, expertise or skills you discover for yourself or learn from others.
The aspects of the job you enjoy doing and why, and the parts of the job you find hard to do and why.
Solutions you find to problems and how you resolve any difficult situations.
Anything that’s quantifiable. You will tend to forget numerical details if you don’t note them, and this type of information can help you to give compelling, specific examples of your achievements when applying for graduate jobs. For example, if you’re organising a social event to raise funds for charity, what was the target, and what was the outcome? What was the budget, and what was the actual expenditure? How many people did you want to come, and how many attended?
Any positive feedback you receive from colleagues, managers and customers.
Details of managers happy to be contacted for job references.

How to record your skills and work experience

Record the skills and experience you gain in a format that you find useful. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Download our work experience tracker – use the questions and prompts to guide you.
Set up your own system. If you prefer to work on-screen, you could use a spreadsheet or set up a table in a document. If you find it easier to work on paper, keep a notepad and pen with you to jot down things when they happen, or on the bus home. Feeling quirky? Send yourself postcards!
If you are allowed to use e-mail where you work, you could send yourself messages recording evidence of the skills you are developing or key work experience achievements. Use a consistent subject line and then you can easily group all your notes together or divert them to a separate folder in your inbox.
Review any information you’ve been given about personal development planning, whether as part of your degree course or from your careers service, as it may include a tool you can adapt.

Reflect on your work experience highlights

At the end of any activity or time of employment it’s always good to gather your thoughts and feelings. Think about what you liked and learned and whether the job suited your skills and personality.

If it’s an area of work you want to follow when you graduate, what skills and experience should you aim to get next in order to strengthen your applications further?

If you’ve just come to the end of a casual vacation job, get as much value out of it as you can by recording what you did and finding good examples of skills that you can use on your graduate CV.