A shokumu keirekisho (職務経歴書) explains your professional experience in enough detail for an employer to judge relevance and capability. Unlike the fixed chronology of a rirekisho, its structure is flexible. The strongest version is selective: it gives more space to evidence that matters for the target role and less to unrelated work.
What the reader is trying to learn
A hiring manager is usually looking for five answers: What environments have you worked in? What were you responsible for? How independently did you operate? What results did you produce? Which of those capabilities transfer to this opening? Your document should make those answers visible without requiring the reader to infer them from job titles.
A reliable default structure
- Title, date, and name — keep these restrained and easy to verify.
- Professional summary (職務要約) — three to five lines describing years, domain, strongest capabilities, and direction.
- Work history (職務経歴) — company, period, role, responsibilities, and achievements.
- Skills and knowledge (活かせる経験・知識・スキル) — grouped, specific, and supported by the work history.
- Qualifications — only what helps the application.
- Self-PR (自己PR) — evidence-based strengths and how they apply to the target role.
Chronological or career-based?
Chronological format (編年体) is the safest default. It shows each company and role in time order, making progression and continuity easy to understand. A reverse-chronological variant can work when recent experience is clearly the most relevant.
Career-based format (キャリア式) groups experience by function or specialty rather than employer. Hello Work materials describe it as useful for technical and specialist candidates who want to foreground a particular body of experience. It can also help candidates with many role changes, but it must still provide enough dates and employer context to verify the timeline.
Write a summary that positions the rest of the page
A summary is not a list of soft skills. Build it from four elements: professional identity, scale or years of experience, two or three relevant strengths, and the type of contribution you want to make.
Hard-working product designer with good communication skills and broad experience.
Product designer with six years of experience in B2B workflow software. Led discovery and interaction design for products used by 18,000 operations users across APAC, and built a design system that reduced UI production time by 40%. Experienced in aligning product, engineering, and customer-success teams around measurable adoption goals.
Describe each role with context, scope, and evidence
Start with employer, department, title, employment type, and exact start/end months. Then write responsibilities separately from achievements. This distinction prevents an important result from disappearing inside a general job description.
| Section | Question it answers | Useful evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Context | What kind of business or team? | Product type, market, team size, customer group |
| Responsibilities | What did you own? | Decisions, recurring work, stakeholders, process |
| Achievements | What changed because of your work? | Revenue, time, quality, adoption, risk, volume |
| Skills developed | What can transfer? | Methods, tools, domain knowledge, leadership |
Turn work into achievements
A practical formula is action + object + approach + result. Not every result needs revenue. Time saved, error reduction, conversion, customer volume, delivery speed, quality, risk reduction, and team adoption are all legitimate outcomes.
Responsible for onboarding redesign and collaboration with engineering.
Redesigned the onboarding flow with product and engineering, cutting median time-to-first-value by 34% across 2,400 new accounts.
If an exact number is confidential, use a truthful range, percentage, scale description, or comparison. Never manufacture a metric. “Reduced weekly manual reconciliation from several hours to under one hour” is useful evidence even without financial data.
Tailor by selecting, not rewriting your history
Maintain one complete career record, then create an application version that selects relevant experiences and adjusts emphasis. The dates, employers, and facts should remain stable. What changes is the order, detail, summary, and self-PR.
- Mirror the employer’s vocabulary where it accurately describes your work.
- Move the most relevant achievement into the first half of the document.
- Shorten unrelated early roles instead of deleting timeline context.
- Explain transferable skills when changing function or industry.
- Keep the document around two pages unless the role or employer calls for more detail.
Final quality check
Read only the headings, company names, role titles, and first bullet of each role. If that skim does not tell a coherent story, strengthen the hierarchy. Then verify dates against the rirekisho, remove unsupported adjectives, expand unfamiliar acronyms, and confirm the PDF has no split headings, clipped rows, or orphaned lines.