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How to List Accomplishments on a Resume (35+ Examples)
Listing accomplishments on your resume can get you more job interviews, but there’s a right and wrong way to do it.
And many job seekers waste a big opportunity by not knowing:
- What type of accomplishments to include (and what to leave off)
- The two best places to put these achievements on your resume to get noticed by employers
- How to start gathering ideas if you can’t think of any accomplishments to begin with
I’m going to cover everything above and show you how to come up with good accomplishments for a resume in any industry…
I’ll also share 35+ resume accomplishment examples to help you start writing your own resume.
Let’s get started…
Why Employers Care About Accomplishments on a Resume
The reason resume accomplishments are so powerful is that they provide proof of your past successes and abilities, and also paint a detailed picture for the employer in terms of what you could do for them.
For example, if an employer sees that you helped your last company grow a key metric or succeed and grow, they’ll be thinking, “Wow, imagine what this person could do for us now!”
It’s always more convincing and memorable to provide specific proof of what you’ve achieved rather than only listing duties and responsibilities on a resume.
Here’s a sample of a good professional accomplishment on a resume and what it does for you…
Imagine you’re writing your resume and trying to describe your contribution to developing a new product.
If you’re like most people, you might write a bullet point like this:
- Assisted in the development of new product suite launched in 2020
Now imagine you list this work accomplishment on your resume like this instead:
- Key member of development team for company’s new product suite in 2020, earning $12 million in the first 10 months after launch
In the second example above, instead of just talking about your basic duties, you’re showing the exact impact your work had on a company’s success. That’s going to set you apart and make recruiters and hiring managers more excited to talk to you.
Not all accomplishments will impress employers, though. So now let’s cover what to put for accomplishments on a resume…
What Are Good Accomplishments for a Resume?
The best accomplishments to put on your resume are work accomplishments, especially those that are relevant to the jobs you’re pursuing now. Your work accomplishment examples should demonstrate to a hiring manager that your past work prepared you to step into their job and succeed now.
Always review the duties and responsibilities on the job description and then think about which of your achievements relate to that type of job. That’s what you should emphasize on your resume.
Also, hiring managers will view your accomplishments and work experience as more relevant/significant if you performed them somewhat recently. So your resume should include more achievements that occurred in your two or three most recent positions.
For example, for your most recent role, you may want to include eight to ten bullet points. For the next role, maybe only six or seven. After that, for older positions, you may want to include even fewer.
Next Step: Brainstorm and Write Your Own Work Accomplishments
To start, it may be helpful to look at past job descriptions of the roles you’ve held, or using your memory, to write down your typical work in a day, week, and month. What did you spend most of your time doing? What were you responsible for? Most importantly, what did you help the company achieve or improve?
That last part is the most important. A list of resume bullets starting with, “Responsible for” is boring and NOT going to win you the interview at most top-tier employers.
So always think about how your work tasks and duties actually helped the company, and then quantify them as much as possible!
Types of Accomplishments and Data to Include:
Numbers paint a clearer picture and grab the reader’s attention on your resume, so include some of these:
- Dollar amounts
- Percent increases or decreases
- Number of people (for example, the number of people you supported as an administrative assistant, the number of people you managed or trained as a supervisor, the number of customer requests you handled per day if you’re in customer service)
- Time periods (for example, saying you helped the company acquire 25 new customers in three months or that you completed a specific project in six weeks and ahead of the deadline)
- Awards you have received and achievements you have accomplished (for example being one of the top five performers in your department)
You may need to ask colleagues and coworkers for ideas or do some research to quantify everything, but the more you can assign specific numbers and results to specific job tasks on your resume, the better.
This article has examples of good power words and verbs for a resume to help you start brainstorming. It also explains why you never want to start bullets with, “Responsible for…”
List Team and Company Results Along With Individual Results
You can also name group and company achievements to give context to the impact of your work. For example, if you’re an administrative assistant supporting a certain team, you can talk about how much revenue that team brought in.
Even if you only played a small role, you were a part of that effort!
You’ll see this a lot in the resume accomplishment samples coming up… so make sure to read the next section carefully.
The bottom line is, don’t feel like you can only include individual resume accomplishments. If you were part of a group, list what your group achieved, too!
35+ Professional Accomplishment Resume Samples
Now that we’ve looked at why it’s important to list accomplishments on your resume and how to begin brainstorming, let’s look at some work accomplishment examples from a variety of industries.
You’ll still need to review your own work to come up with specific ideas that fit you, but these sample bullets below will help you gather ideas and begin to write good accomplishments of your own.
Resume Achievement Examples for Students and New Grads:
- Led class project to research and present financial forecasts for global markets
- Dean’s List 2019
- Delivered presentation on diffusion and osmosis as a part of Biology 301 course, earning a 100% grade in the class
- Active member of university debate club
- Varsity soccer, 2018-2019
As you can see, you can mix a variety of academic awards, club and sport participation, and presentations and projects, and your grades! These are all fair game when writing resume achievements as a student.
When you don’t have any full-time work experience yet, your academic work is your experience, so it’s important to show details beyond the name of your university and the degree you earned! Share more detail and you’ll stand out from other students and entry-level candidates.
Sample Resume Accomplishments for Administrative Assistants:
- Administrative assistant to 12-person digital marketing team responsible for driving $1.9 million in annual revenue and an average of 180 new business leads per month
- Administrative assistant to a team of 10 Account Managers, overseeing $109 million in client accounts and growing 19% in 2020
- Promoted from Administrative Assistant to Senior Administrative Assistant due to consistent above-average performance and recognized as a “rising star” in 2020, an award given to just 2% of new employees
- Spearheaded a record-keeping process reorganization that led to a 20% time savings across the administrative team in Q4 2020
- Scheduled and coordinated meetings and travel arrangements for 11 managers and supervisors with 100% accuracy
- Trained two administrative assistants during a period of company expansion to ensure attention to detail and accuracy of work
- Implemented new document filing and organizational procedure resulting in a $9,200 annual savings in contracted labor costs
Note that you can vary how you begin each resume bullet. While many of your bullets should begin with verbs like, “Spearheaded,” you can also start others with a job title, like “Administrative Assistant.” You can see this in the first two examples in the list of bullets above.
Having some variety in language makes your resume more interesting to the reader, and using your job title in a few bullets is an effective way of adding some great keywords to your resume to get past any automated application systems the employer is using.
Sample Professional Accomplishments for Customer Service:
- Achieved a customer satisfaction rating of 98.2% in 2020, 3rd best among customer support team of 100+ employees
- Addressed an average of 200 inbound customer requests per week while also educating the customer about up-sells and additional ways our company could help them, which led to an additional $188,000 in revenue in 2019
- Decreased average customer wait time for service requests by 3% company-wide by creating email response templates for the department
- Managed training and onboarding of new customer service associates, in partnership with Department Head, for all 12 new customer support associates hired in 2020
- Managed 50+ daily inbound enterprise customer requests via phone and email in support of enterprise division’s 244% year-over-year growth in 2020
As you can see from the examples above, you can mix in achievements that highlight your day-to-day work, but also any projects you led, process improvement actions you implemented to save the department time or money, etc.
You can also mention any leadership skills used, such as training new team members, participating in the interview process when hiring new staff, etc.
These work achievements all show potential employers that you were trusted by your previous company and can bring valuable skills to your next position!
Sample Resume Accomplishments/Achievements for Sales & Marketing:
- Increased division revenue by 4% through achieving 212% of personal sales quota in 2020
- Developed cross-selling promotional campaign to bundle 3 top-selling products, increasing department revenue by 12% in 2020
- Orchestrated new social media marketing campaign resulting in a 309% increase in online leads generated in Q1 2020
- Achieved third-highest sales total in 2019 among a team of 50+ sales associates
- Increased sales by 9% through the successful rollout of a new subscription service spearheaded by myself and 3 team members
Sales jobs tend to be some of the easiest in terms of coming up with professional accomplishments on a resume, so I won’t put too many here. Just remember, always look at the job description and demonstrate skills that are relevant for the jobs you’re applying to now. And always think about how your duties and responsibilities can be quantified.
Professional Accomplishment Examples for Human Resources Resume:
- Trained and onboarded 22 new team members in Q4 2020, ensuring an understanding of company policies, goals, and mission
- Managed 12 contract recruiters and successfully hired 19 new team members in 2020 to help the company grow 22% year-over-year
- Implemented new onboarding process resulting in 20% less manager time required to onboard new employees through the use of software learning tools
- Promoted from Human Resources Associate to Human Resources Supervisor position in 2020
- Facilitated successful move to new office in 2019, coordinating more than 200 employees across 6 different departments to limit downtime and maximize productivity during office transition
Work Accomplishment Examples for Software Developers:
- Managed the development of new subscription video platform, which earned the company $3.1 million in the first year after launch
- Performed code optimization on online customer dashboard, eliminating 2,000+ lines of code and reducing server resource usage by 19%
- Managed and led 9-person development team building the company’s new mobile apps (iOS and Android), successfully launching both projects in 2020, with an average app store review of 4.6 stars
- Spearheaded quality assurance project for company’s new Android app, diagnosing and eliminating 104 bugs/errors in the first 3 months after launch, resulting in a 22% increase in average user rating in the following 3 months
- Interviewed 22 potential new software engineering candidates for our company, ensuring adequate knowledge of software development and computer science, as well as cultural fit
Work Accomplishments for Manager/Director Resume:
- Oversaw 12-person marketing team responsible for 22% of the total revenue in the business, while growing the team 108% in 2020
- Managed 22 staff, overseeing 25+ projects per quarter with total project budgets exceeding $2.5 million
- Developed new recruiting & hiring plan, helping the department fill average job openings 29% faster compared to prior year
- Managed 29 staff (11 direct reports; 18 indirect) across 2 office locations and 2 business divisions, including hiring, performance reviews, and day-to-day guidance and oversight
- Saved business $29,000 in 2019 by implementing new customer service process that reduced refund requests by 9%
Where to Put Professional Accomplishments on Your Resume
The best place to list accomplishments on your resume is under your work experience, particularly in your bullets. Your resume bullets are the ideal place to list work accomplishments because bullets stand out visually and grab the reader’s attention. They are almost always one of the first places that recruiters and hiring managers look at on a resume.
You can also write a couple of key accomplishments in your resume summary paragraph at the top of the document. But then list even more in your bullets under your employment history.
Those are the two most important places to put this information on your resume.
And in general, if you’re not currently using bullets on your resume, that’s a big missed opportunity. Don’t rely on long paragraphs to describe your work. Long paragraphs get skipped or skimmed over!
It’s okay to have a short introductory paragraph describing each role (before the bullets), and it’s also okay to begin your resume with a one-paragraph summary of key accomplishments. But the bulk of your employment history section should be in bullet format because that’s what employers will read carefully!
Should You Include a Separate “Key Achievements” Resume Section?
If you read everything above, you now know that the best place to list key achievements on your resume is in your chronological work experience and your professional summary.
But if you want to provide some additional info, then you can consider adding a dedicated “Key Achievements” section.
This can help you include some additional keywords on your resume and variations of keywords. And if you’ve racked up many professional awards and impressive results across a long career, it allows you to show everything in one place at-a-glance.
If you decide to create this section, then the 35+ bullets we looked at above could serve as key achievement examples for you to use here, too.
However, I recommend keeping the list short (eight to ten bullets or fewer), which is also what I recommend for a Skills section.
As a recruiter, I prefer to see context for where/when you used each skill, which I see in your resume work history. So that’s where most of your time/effort should go in terms of writing your resume.
Anything you include in a “Key Achievements” section should also be listed under your work experience.
For more help structuring your resume and deciding which sections to include and where, read this article about everything to put on a resume.
Conclusion
You’re more likely to get an interview for a position if you list results and accomplishments on your resume, especially if those results are relevant to the employer’s needs.
Don’t think of your resume as just a list of what you were responsible for in past roles. Instead, share achievements and results, and quantify them whenever possible.
There are a variety of achievements you can list, from managing a project, training a new team member, helping to sell more products, creating a new process, or receiving an award.
Find as many accomplishments as you can for your resume, and you’ll stand out from other job seekers.
If you take this approach with your resume, you’ll get more job interviews.
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