How to Show Promotions on Your CV: A Guide

Why Showcase Promotions on Your CV

Your promotions help to tell a story of your career and show the reader your progression from junior to more senior levels. Your promotions demonstrate how you’ve driven your career forward, gained more responsibility and increased your value and importance to employers.

If you’ve been working for a while and have experienced promotion to more senior levels, including these on your CV will show your professional growth, while aligning with your own career objectives. They can also reassure recruiters and hiring managers that your current or previous employers have trusted you to move into more senior positions and take on more responsibility for the organisation.

Typically, any promotion that demonstrates a vertical move to a more senior position within an organisation is worth mentioning on your CV. However, if you’ve made a sideways move to a different role at the same level, this can also be worth mentioning if it shows how you’ve developed a new skill set and experience in a different part of the organisation.

Format for Displaying Promotions

There are two main options for displaying your promotions in your CV’s work experience section. The format you decide to use in your CV will depend on the type of promotion, and how much your job changed between the two roles. Before we explain the two formats for promotions, here are a couple of general formatting points:

• List your promotions in reverse-chronological order, starting with your most senior role, and working back from there.
• Clearly label each position with the job title and the dates of each role, so the employer can see your career progression.

Here’s a summary of the two main ways to display promotions on your CV:

Stacked promotions

If your previous role and the position you were promoted to share many of the same skills and responsibilities, you could stack your job titles, one directly under the other. In this case, you would provide a single bullet point list outlining your skills, experience and achievements in both roles combined.

For example:

If you’re using this format, you may wish to use your first bullet point to explain your promotion from the junior to the senior role.

Separate promotions

If your previous role and the position you were promoted to require different skills, or include significantly different responsibilities, you’ll probably want to separate them out. In this case, add the name and location of your employer, followed by your current, or most senior role. Under this, add bullet points explaining your responsibilities, skills and achievements in the role. Following this, add the job title of your previous, more junior role, followed by a bullet point list for that role.

For example:

Showcasing Skills Progression

Listing your promotions on your CV gives you a great opportunity to show how your skills and abilities have progressed over time. This can all help to convey the idea that you’re willing and able to learn, put your skills to good use and move forward in your career journey. Every part of your CV should show that you’ve made progression throughout your career to prepare yourself to step into the role you’re applying for. Showing your skills progression through your promotions is the ideal way to do this.

Assuming you’ve moved from a junior role into a more senior position with the same employer, this gives you a chance to show a progression in your skills development. In this scenario, you can divide the skills you’re keen to highlight between the two roles, as follows:

• Use your junior role to showcase soft skills and the fundamental basics required for the job.
• Use your more senior role to showcase expertise, specialist knowledge and technical skills.

Organising your skills in this manner will give the reader the impression of career progression and a commitment to learning, which is likely to increase your chances of success in your applications.

Highlighting Achievements and Accomplishments

When listing separate roles within the same organisation on your CV, it’s critical to highlight relevant achievements and accomplishments in both roles. Every job you include in your work experience section, whether for different employers or within the same organisation, should showcase some accomplishments that help show the employer you’re right for the job. If, for example, you’re only able to list achievements relevant to your application in one of the roles, the other job might not be worth mentioning on your CV. 

Follow these tips to ensure all your jobs show valuable career achievements and accomplishments:

1. Make sure each achievement showcases a skill listed in the job description
2. Quantify your achievements by adding key metrics and data that shows the impact you had, and your value to the employer.
3. Save your most impressive, impactful achievements for your most senior, recent promotions, to show career progression and professional development.

Addressing Job Title Changes and Responsibilities

Separating out your promotions in your CV will give the employer a clear timeline of your career progression. Presenting your previous employments in reverse chronological order means you should have your most recent, senior position at the top of your work experience section, followed by each preceding, more junior role.

If it’s not clear from the job title that your more recent roles are more senior than the preceding jobs you’ve held, make sure your bullet points emphasise this. You could do this by mentioning:

• Increases in the budget you’re responsible for
• Increases in the amount of people you supervise or manage
• How your reporting lines have changed (the seniority of your manager)
• How your focus has become more strategic in more recent positions
• Specialist technical skills necessary for the more senior role
• Specialist certifications or professional memberships required for the more senior role

If your recent role wasn’t more senior than the one that preceded it, you can still showcase career progression by mentioning new specialist skills you’ve learned. You can also ensure the achievements you mention in the more recent role are more major than the accomplishments in your preceding roles.

Examples of Promotions on a CV

Here are some CV examples of promotions, to show you how the different formats work in practice:

Stacked promotion example

Separate promotion example

Listing your promotions on your CV gives you a great opportunity to show how your skills and abilities have progressed over time.

Key Takeaways for Adding Promotions to Your CV

Adding promotions to your CV can be an effective way of showcasing your career progression, achievements and skills development. List different roles within the same organisation clearly, and show the key responsibilities for each job, showing progression in your expertise and the impact of your achievements. Using a professional CV maker, such as CVwizard, can help you organise your CV and present it in an attractive, eye-catching format. Sign up today to access CV templates and find a wealth of tools and resources to help you create a winning job application.