How do I describe my work experience in English?
Describe your current job in the present perfect with for or since, and every previous job in the past simple with dates. Strong verbs such as managed, led, improved, and developed make your achievements concrete.
- Current job: present perfect + for/since ("I have worked here for five years").
- Past jobs: past simple + dates ("I worked at Bosch from 2018 to 2021").
- German "seit fünf Jahren" is "for five years" in English — never "since five years."
B1 · Job Interviews · 10 minDescribing work experience, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-slide lesson for B1 learners. Hear the career sentence in context, meet the two-tense rule from a human tutor, then practise it across six interactive drills before a final five-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelB1 · Intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsGrammar, Vocabulary, Listening, Writing
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
Why describing work experience is its own skill
Every interviewer asks this question sooner or later, and it wears many costumes: "Walk me through your CV," "Tell me about your background," "What did you do at your last company?" Whatever the wording, they are listening for two things — a clear chronology and the right tenses. English forces a decision that German does not: at every station of your career, your grammar must signal whether the job is still running or already finished. That one decision controls the grammar of your whole answer. Get it right and you sound organised and in control; get it wrong and you can accidentally rewrite your own biography. Say "I worked at Müller GmbH for five years" about your current employer and a native listener quietly concludes that you have left — the past simple closes the door behind you. This lesson gives you the two tenses, the vocabulary of achievement, and a structure you can reuse in any interview.
02 / 06
Your current role: present perfect with for and since
For the job you hold today, English uses the present perfect: have or has plus the past participle. "I have worked at Müller GmbH for five years." "I have been with the company since 2021." The tense says: this started in the past and is still true — exactly the message you want to send about your current employer. Two small words carry the timing. For measures the length of the period: for five years, for six months. Since names its starting point: since 2021, since March, since I finished my degree. Here German sets a double trap. "Ich arbeite seit fünf Jahren bei Müller" uses the present tense, so German speakers translate it word for word as "I work at Müller since five years" — wrong tense and wrong preposition in a single sentence. Remember the pattern as one package: seit plus a duration becomes present perfect plus for. The continuous form is equally natural, by the way: "I have been working there for five years."
03 / 06
Past roles: past simple with dates
The moment a job is over, its grammar changes. Every finished role takes the past simple, and it usually arrives with dates attached: "I worked at Bosch from 2018 to 2021." "I joined the company in 2015 and left in 2019." "I spent three years in customer service." Closed time expressions — from … to, in 2019, three years ago — are past-simple territory. This is where the German Perfekt misleads you. "Ich habe bei Bosch gearbeitet" sounds like "I have worked at Bosch," and as a bare statement of experience that sentence is actually possible. But add the dates and the present perfect collapses: "I have worked at Bosch from 2018 to 2021" is ungrammatical, because the perfect cannot live inside a closed period. In an interview you almost always give the dates — so for past roles, train yourself to reach for the past simple first, and attach the years as you go.
04 / 06
Achievement verbs: managed, led, improved, developed
Interviewers hear "I was responsible for" a dozen times a day. What they remember are concrete verbs with concrete results. Four verbs carry most of the load. Managed signals responsibility for people, budgets, or projects: "I managed a team of six." Led puts you at the front: "I led the rollout of our new CRM system." Improved says you made something that already existed measurably better: "I improved our response times." Developed says you built something new: "I developed the onboarding programme for new technicians." Notice the tense: achievements are finished events, so they take the past simple even when they happened in your current job — "Last year I improved our release process" is correct although you still work there, because the project itself is complete. The strongest pattern is verb plus object plus measurable result. One honest number beats three adjectives — and only claim achievements you can back up when the interviewer asks a follow-up question.
05 / 06
CV false friends: Praktikum, Chef, and other traps
Two false friends sabotage more German CVs than any grammar mistake. The first is Praktikum. The English word is internship: "I did a six-month internship at a logistics company." The look-alike practicum does exist, but it is a rare, mainly North American academic term for supervised training inside a degree course — on a normal CV it reads oddly. The second is Chef. In English, a chef cooks. Your German Chef is your boss, or more formally your manager or supervisor: "My manager approved the project." Both the German word and the English one go back to the French chef, meaning head — English simply narrowed it to the head of a kitchen. A related habit worth dropping: translating German job titles word for word. Look up how the role is actually advertised in English-speaking job markets and use that exact title; an invented literal translation makes recruiters pause at precisely the moment you want them to nod.
06 / 06
Structuring the answer: chronological and compact
A strong answer to "Tell me about your experience" has a shape, and the easiest shape is reverse chronology: start with today, then walk backwards. "I've worked at Müller GmbH for five years, currently as team lead for logistics. Before that, I worked at Bosch for three years, where I managed key accounts. I started my career with an internship at a freight forwarder." Signpost words hold the structure together: currently, before that, then, after two years, since then. The tense pattern follows automatically — present perfect for the opening sentence, past simple for every station after before that. Aim for roughly 60 to 90 seconds: long enough to show a career, short enough to leave room for questions. Close with a bridge to the role you are applying for: "… and that is exactly the experience I would bring to this position." Then rehearse the answer aloud, not just in your head — the tenses need to live in your mouth, not on paper.