How to Get Your Employment History

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When applying for new positions, most applications will require you to list your work history. If you’ve been in the professional world for a while, you may not remember every job you’ve worked in the past. This article explains what employment history is and the best ways to keep track of your own employment history.

What is employment history?

Employment history is a record of a person’s previous employment. Your work history typically includes information on employer names, job titles, positions held, duties, responsibilities and dates of employment. 

Employment history helps employers understand and verify your employment background. Your entire work history is also useful when writing a resume because it helps you easily identify the most relevant experience for a given job application. 

Can employers verify your work history?

Yes, employers can verify your work history by contacting the previous employers you list on your resume. Employers normally verify the dates of your previous employment, your job titles and your duties. Knowing your work history can ensure the information you provided on your resume is accurate and honest.

How to find your work history

Here are some steps you can follow if you want to find your own work history and make your resume more accurate:

1. Firstly, search old documents

Sifting through your previous tax records can help you find previous jobs. When you file tax returns, you also file a W2 form that shows dates of employment and company names. If you have a copy of these records, you can easily get important work history details.

If you used an online service to prepare some of your tax returns, log in to that service and get the information you need from your saved documents. Note, however, that any online service will only have tax documents from the year(s) that you filed your returns using that service. 

Your tax returns aren’t the only documented source of your employment history. Consider also searching through old resumes because they might list jobs that you’ve forgotten about. 

2. Next, contact the Social Security Administration

You can get your work history from the Social Security Administration by filling in a Request for Social Security Earnings Information form. You can either get a certified or a non-certified statement of your earnings, which will also show details of your work history, including employment dates and employer names.

3. Thirdly, contact former employers

You can also contact your previous employers (assuming you remember the names of the companies you used to work for). It’s very likely your former employers will have some of the most essential details about your time with them on record, such as your job title, dates of employment and main duties. 

The quickest route to getting details of work history from former employers is to directly contact their human resources department. In some cases, you might find that a company you used to work for has gone out of business—if that is the case, you can still try the other options on this list. 

4. Finally, use your computer

You can perform a local search on your hard drive for old resumes you saved, and they will often show the details about your past employment that you’re looking for.  

If you can’t find any resume documents on your hard drive, the internet is a good alternative to check out. You can log in to various professional networking or social media platforms and look around for details of your former employment. When initially setting up a profile on many of these platforms, they ask you to fill in information about your work and there is a good chance you completed these sections using the information you are looking for.

If you go through all of these steps, you should be able to completely trace out your entire employment history, no matter how long your career has been. The next important thing to do is to understand how to keep track of the work history you’ve compiled for future reference. 

Tips to keep track of your employment history

After going through all the steps to find out your full work history, here are some actionable tips to keep track of things for the future:

Update your online profiles

All professional networking websites give you the chance to fill in extensive information about your employment history. Take the opportunity to update your profiles when you have the time so that you can easily get your work history in the future. Consider updating your social media profiles with your work history—most platforms let you keep this information private so that only you can see it. 

Create a resume master copy

If you have worked in several jobs over many years, you’ll probably know that adding every one of them to your resume is not practical. Employers really just want to see your relevant work experience and you don’t need to fit your entire career into the work history section of your resume. However, creating a master copy of your resume is a good way to keep a record of your entire employment history in one document. You can refer to the master copy when tailoring your resume to suit particular job applications. 

Save important work history information to the cloud

To ensure you don’t lose important electronic documents containing information about your work history, it is advisable to back them up to the cloud. There are many free file storage services available where you can upload your master resume and other relevant files. Cloud services let you access your files anytime, anywhere.  

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