Accomplishments for Resumes: How to Highlight Your Achievements

Highlighting your past accomplishments on your resume is one of the most effective ways to impress employers and show them what you’re capable of.

Need ideas for how to list your achievements? Our in-house career expert Eva explains what you can do to set yourself apart in this video:

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Our Expert:

Eva Chan

In this article, we break down where, when, and how to list accomplishments on your resume, complete with helpful examples.

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Where to include your resume accomplishments

When you write your resume, there are several places where you’ve got the opportunity to draw attention to your accomplishments and contributions at work:

• Your resume introduction
• The work experience section
• A dedicated “Awards” section

Here are three examples of what this looks like on a resume:

Resume introduction

Highlight your most impressive achievements in your resume introduction to immediately grab hiring managers’ attention.

Experience section

Use the work experience section of your resume to go into detail about your most relevant work achievements.

Awards section

If the key accomplishments you want to highlight include multiple awards, add a dedicated awards section to your resume.

How to spotlight your professional accomplishments

Here are some essential tips for making the accomplishments on your resume stand out:

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1. Use action verbs

When writing the work experience section of your resume, always begin your bullet points with strong action words. A powerful action verb places you as an initiator of action, clearly showing the employers what you achieved and how you achieved it.

Take a look at these two examples:

In the first example, the candidate makes a general statement that doesn’t explain how they were involved in the project, or what they accomplished.

By contrast, the second example uses the action words “designed” and “implemented”, telling the hiring manager what their role was and that the project was successfully executed.

Here are more examples of action verbs hiring managers like seeing on resumes:

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2. Follow the PAR method

There’s a simple formula that any job seeker can follow to construct accomplishment-oriented bullet points.

It’s called the ‘PAR’ Method, which stands for problem, action, and results. When applied to your resume, the ‘Par Method’ encourages you to:

• Identify a responsibility or issue at work (the problem)
• Discuss how you addressed the problem (the action)
• Explain the outcome of that action (the results)

While that may sound like a lot to fit into one sentence, ‘PAR’ can easily be implemented in resume bullet points in your experience section. Check out the examples below:

Notice that the problem, action, and result doesn’t always need to be placed in the same order.

If you want to save time, you can also use an online resume builder to format your accomplishments into PAR format for you. Most software today is designed to structure your resume bullet points in the most impactful way possible.

Check out a PAR example in this short video:

@resumegenius If you want to impress recruiters with your resume, you must showcase your work achievements, not your responsibilities. The PAR (Problem – Action – Result) is a great way to do so 📝 Watch this video to learn how to use this method and land for job interviews 👍 🔸 More tips on how to highlight your achievements on your resume here: resumegeniusDOTme/highlight-achievements-on-resume #interviewtips #interviewquestions #interviewskills #interviewprep ♬ Chill Vibes – Tollan Kim

3. Quantify your accomplishments

Employers want workers who can achieve concrete results at the job, and results are best stated in terms of hard numbers.

How many employees did you work with or oversee? By what percentage did you increase sales or efficiency? How much of a budget did you work with, with what type of results? Providing numbers like these will help highlight your accomplishments and show hiring managers what you’re capable of.

By using numbers in your work experience section, you’re demonstrating your focus as being results-oriented rather than task-oriented. For example, compare these two statements:

By including a percentage as well as time spent, the second statement ensures the potential employer has a measurable, defined idea of what the candidate has accomplished, rather than a general job responsibility that can already be guessed from the job title.

In order to measure your accomplishments, try to obtain as much data as you can in regard to your previous work experience

Below are some questions to help you think of ways you can quantify your achievements (broken down in terms of percentages, numbers, dollar amounts, and time).

Questions to ask yourself:

Percentages:

• Did you increase sales, market share, or customer satisfaction by a certain percentage? How?
• Did you increase efficiency or productivity by a certain percentage?
• Did you recruit, work with, or manage a certain number of employees or teams?
• How many customers did you serve on average? Did you increase the number of customers served? By how much?
• Did you implement new ideas, systems, or processes to the company? What was the impact?

Dollar amounts:

• Did you propose or work with a budget of a certain dollar amount?
• Did you increase sales or profitability by a certain dollar amount? How?

Time:

• Did you decrease delivery or turnaround time on a project? How?
• Was one of your achievements completed within a tight deadline?
• Did you resolve any particular issues? How soon?

This example below quantifies both the team size and duration of the accomplishment.

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All of these are examples where you can quantify an achievement and translate your work experience into a results-oriented approach. In order to provide even more detail, consider also answering “How?” in regard to how you achieved the accomplishment.

Work accomplishment examples by industry

Not sure what highlighting your accomplishments looks like in practice? Here are a few industry-specific examples demonstrating how to include accomplishments on your resume: