How to write achievement bullets on a CV

Turn duty lists into achievement bullets with one repeatable pattern and eight worked rewrites.

Most CVs describe jobs. Strong CVs describe what changed because you were in the job. The difference sits almost entirely in the bullet points under each role, and you can fix them with one pattern.

The pattern

Every achievement bullet has up to four parts:

Put together: Reorganised the stockroom and delivery schedule, cutting morning restock time from 3 hours to 75 minutes.

You will not always have all four. Action and what are the minimum. Add the result whenever you know it, and the number whenever you can find or honestly estimate one (the quantify achievements guide shows how).

Three rules that make the pattern work

1. Start with the verb. Not “I”, not “Responsible for”, not “Duties included”. The first word should say what you did. See action verbs for lists by field.
2. One idea per bullet. If a bullet contains “and also”, split it.
3. Keep it under about 30 words. Two lines on an A4 or Letter page is plenty. The builder flags bullets that run longer.

Eight before/after rewrites

Each “before” below is the kind of line that appears on thousands of CVs. Each “after” applies the pattern. The people and numbers are fictional; yours will differ, so use the shape, not the figures.

Retail

Before: Responsible for stock control and merchandising.

After: Cut stock write-offs by 18% in one year by introducing weekly date checks and moving short-dated lines to a front-of-store offer bay.

The before is a job description. The after names a change (write-offs down), how you did it (date checks, offer bay) and how much (18%, one year).

Nursing

Before: Duties included patient care, medication rounds and liaising with doctors.

After: Cared for up to 8 patients per shift on a 28-bed acute medical ward, and introduced a handover checklist that the ward adopted for all night shifts.

In clinical roles the “result” is often scope and trust rather than a percentage. Patient load, ward type and a practice others adopted are all concrete. Never include anything that could identify a patient.

Teaching

Before: Taught maths to Year 9 and Year 10 classes.

After: Taught maths to four Year 9 and 10 classes (112 students); 74% of my Year 10 set reached a grade 5 or above in mock exams, up from 52% the previous year.

If you quote results, quote ones your school recorded and keep the comparison fair (same year group, same kind of assessment). Note that “my” slips into this bullet naturally; that is fine, though most bullets read better without it (see tense and pronouns).

Software

Before: Worked on the backend API.

After: Rewrote the search endpoint’s database queries, reducing median response time from 900 ms to 140 ms for about 40,000 daily users.

“Worked on” hides what you did. Engineers reading your CV want the change and the scale, and they will ask about both at interview, so only claim numbers you can explain.

Administration

Before: Handled the diary and meeting arrangements for the director.

After: Managed the diary and travel for a director and three senior managers, booking around 60 meetings a month and cutting double-bookings to zero after moving the team to a shared calendar.

Admin work is often invisible when it goes well. Volume (60 meetings a month), the number of people supported and a problem you removed make it visible.

Hospitality

Before: Worked as a waiter in a busy restaurant.

After: Served a section of 12 tables (up to 90 covers a night) in a 140-seat restaurant, and trained 5 new starters on the till and allergen procedures.

“Busy” is an adjective the reader has to trust. Covers and table counts are facts they can picture.

Finance

Before: Assisted with month-end close.

After: Took over bank and intercompany reconciliations for 6 entities, helping shorten month-end close from 9 working days to 6.

“Assisted with” undersells you. Name the part you owned. “Helping shorten” is honest when the improvement was a team effort; you do not have to claim the whole result to show you contributed to it.

Warehouse

Before: Picked and packed orders.

After: Picked and packed an average of 140 order lines an hour against a site target of 110, with a 99.8% accuracy rate over 12 months.

Warehouse roles often come with measured targets, which makes them some of the easiest to quantify. If your site tracked picks per hour, accuracy or safety, use those figures.

A ninth: the bullet with no number

Some achievements resist numbers. That is fine as long as the result is still concrete.

Before: Helped improve the onboarding process.

After: Wrote the team’s first onboarding guide, now given to every new hire in the support team.

The result here is adoption: something you made became the standard. Other number-free results include “approved by”, “adopted by”, “chosen to”, “selected for”, “praised in an external audit” and “first person in the team to”.

Where duties still belong

You do not need to delete every duty. A one-line description of the role, written as plain text under the job title, can set the scene: “Ran a 25-person convenience store open 7am to 11pm.” Then let the bullets show what you achieved within that scope. If you find you have six duty bullets and no achievements, ask yourself these questions about each duty:

• What would have gone wrong if I hadn’t done this well?
• Did anything get faster, cheaper, safer, larger or more accurate while I did it?
• Did anyone praise, adopt, copy or promote something because of it?
• How many, how often, how much?

One honest answer to any of these turns a duty into an achievement.

Tip: Write the long version first, with every detail you remember, then cut it down to the pattern. It is much easier to trim a full sentence than to inflate a thin one.

How many bullets per role

A reasonable default:

• Current or most recent role: 4 to 6 bullets.
• Previous relevant roles: 3 to 4.
• Older or less relevant roles: 1 to 2, or just the title, employer and dates.

Order bullets by relevance to the job you are applying for, not by when they happened. Your strongest, most relevant achievement goes first.

Common mistakes

Watch out: Numbers you cannot back up. Interviewers often pick a figure from your CV and ask how you measured it. “About”, “roughly” and ranges are fine; invented precision is not.

• Claiming a team’s result as your own. Use “helped”, “contributed to” or “as part of a team of 6” when it is accurate. That is different from opening a bullet with “Helped with”, which is vague about what you did.
• Stacking adjectives. “Successfully and efficiently delivered” says less than “Delivered 3 weeks early”.
• Jargon only your employer used. Internal project names and acronyms mean nothing outside the building. Describe what the thing was.
• Inconsistent punctuation. Either end every bullet with a full stop or none of them. The builder flags a mix.

Check your bullets in five minutes

Read each bullet and ask:

1. Does it start with a verb that says what I did?
2. Could the reader picture the scale (a number, a size, a frequency)?
3. Is there a result, or only an activity?
4. Is it under about 30 words?
5. Would I be comfortable explaining it in an interview?

The builder runs some of these checks for you: it flags weak openings such as “responsible for” and “worked on”, achievement bullets with no number, and bullets that run long. It cannot judge whether the result is real or relevant; that part is yours.

Next: find numbers when you think you have none, or pick a stronger verb from the action verbs lists.