Job responsibilities do not get a section of their own on a CV. They live inside your work experience entries, and where they sit within those entries determines whether they are read. This page covers placement: where responsibilities go, how they relate to the other sections, and the structural mistakes that bury good material.
Where Responsibilities Belong
Under each job in your work experience section, as bullet points beneath the job title, employer, dates and scope line. That is the only place they belong on a conventional CV.
Resist the temptation to create a separate responsibilities section listing everything you have ever been accountable for. It divorces each responsibility from the role that produced it, forces the reader to work out where it belongs, and removes the context that makes it meaningful.
The Structure Around Them
Responsibilities sit inside a five-part entry, and the parts above them do work that the bullets themselves cannot.
- Job title, which sets expectations for what follows.
- Employer and city.
- Dates, month and year.
- A scope line describing the employer and the size of your remit.
- Responsibility bullets, four to six for recent roles.
The scope line is the part most often missing. Without it, a reader has no way to judge whether your responsibilities were exercised over five people or five hundred, and they will assume the smaller figure.
Responsibilities Versus the Skills Section
These two sections overlap and people frequently duplicate between them, which wastes space twice.
- Skills section: what you are capable of, in short form, near the top, matched to the advert. Systems, certifications, languages.
- Responsibilities: what you actually did with those capabilities, in context, inside each role.
The skills block asserts, the responsibilities evidence. Naming Sage in your skills block and then showing what you did in Sage under a specific job is a strong combination. Listing Sage twice in identical words is not.
Responsibilities Versus the Professional Summary
The summary is where you state the shape of your experience in three or four lines. It should not list responsibilities, since they appear below in full. Its job is to tell the reader what kind of person is about to be described, so they read the rest with the right frame.
Structural Mistakes That Bury Good Material
- Creating a separate responsibilities or key duties section away from the roles.
- Putting the education section above work experience when you have substantial experience.
- Listing responsibilities in a paragraph rather than bullets, which gets skimmed.
- Ordering bullets chronologically rather than by relevance to the advert.
- Giving an old role the same number of bullets as your current one.
- Repeating identical responsibilities under several employers instead of showing progression.
- Putting the most relevant responsibility in position five, where it will not be read.
How Much Space Responsibilities Should Take
Work experience should be the largest section on a CV for anyone with more than a year or two of employment, and responsibilities are most of it. If your skills section, interests and a lengthy summary are crowding it out, the balance is wrong.
Roughly, work experience should occupy half to two-thirds of a two-page CV. Education, skills, certifications, languages and references share the remainder.
When Education Goes First
Only when it is genuinely your strongest asset: recent graduates, school leavers, career changers whose new qualification is the point, and roles where a specific qualification is the primary requirement. Everyone else puts work experience first, because that is what will be assessed.
Ordering Multiple Roles
Reverse chronological, most recent first, is standard and expected in South Africa. Where you held several roles at one employer, list the employer once and the roles beneath it with their own dates, which shows progression clearly rather than looking like separate jobs.
Compress anything beyond about ten years to title, employer and dates, or group several older roles under a single earlier career heading.
Related Pages
For the wording of the bullets themselves, see duties for CV and Work Experience Duties for CV.
FAQs
Where do job responsibilities go on a CV?
Inside your work experience section, as bullet points under each job title, employer, dates and scope line. They do not get a section of their own, since separating them from the role that produced them removes the context that makes them meaningful.
Should I have a separate responsibilities section?
No. It divorces each responsibility from its role, forces the reader to work out where it belongs, and usually duplicates material already in your work experience. Keep responsibilities within the entries they belong to.
How do responsibilities differ from the skills section?
The skills block asserts what you are capable of, in short form near the top. Responsibilities evidence it, showing what you actually did in context under each role. Use both, but do not repeat the same wording in each.
How much of my CV should be work experience?
Roughly half to two-thirds of a two-page CV for anyone with more than a year or two of employment. If skills, interests and a long summary are crowding it out, the balance is wrong and the section that will actually be assessed is being squeezed.
Should education go before work experience?
Only when education is genuinely your strongest asset, such as for recent graduates, school leavers, career changers or roles where a specific qualification is the primary requirement. Otherwise work experience goes first.