Work Experience Calculator

Three measures, gaps and an eligibility check

It measures your work experience three different ways, finds every gap in your employment history automatically, and tells you whether you meet a required number of years.

The reason for three measurements is that "how much experience do you have" is not one question. An application asking for five years of experience might mean five years of anything, five years in a particular field, or five full-time-equivalent years. Those can differ by a wide margin for the same person, and quoting the wrong one is either underselling yourself or overstating your position.

Gaps get the same treatment. They are found by the calculator rather than entered by you, which means one cannot be quietly left out, and each is measured exactly so you know what a reader of your CV will see.

How it differs from the experience calculator

Both tools take a list of jobs and both merge overlapping roles. They diverge in what they do next.

The experience calculator is about the headline total. It gives the figure in every unit, draws a visual timeline of your career, offers a switch for counting overlapping engagements in full, and produces resume-ready wording. Use it when the question is simply "how long have I been working".

This calculator is about qualifying against a standard. It splits experience by employment type, separates relevant from total, applies a part-time weighting if one is required, lists every gap with its exact length, and answers a yes-or-no eligibility question. Use it when something specific has to be demonstrated.

When a breakdown by type matters

Applicants for roles with a stated minimum — five years for a senior position, three years post-qualification for a professional registration, a threshold in a visa or immigration category. These assessments are usually made against a fixed date and a specific definition of qualifying experience.

People with a mixed history: internships alongside permanent roles, part-time work during study, freelance contracts between employments. Working out what portion counts under a given rule is genuinely difficult by hand.

Anyone preparing to explain a career gap, who wants the exact length rather than a vague "about a year". Recruiters and HR staff checking a candidate's stated experience against the dates they supplied.

How to use it

1. Enter each role with its dates and employment type. Tick the current-job box for a role you still hold.
2. Mark which roles are relevant to the position you are applying for. Everything is ticked by default; untick the ones that would not count.
3. Enter the requirement if there is one, and choose which basis it should be measured against. Leave it blank to skip the check.
4. Set the part-time weighting only if a rule specifically discounts part-time work. The default of 100% counts it in full.
5. Set the calculation date to an application closing date where relevant.
6. Press Calculate.

What each input means

Employment type

Full-time, part-time, internship, or contract and freelance. The type does not change how the days are counted; it determines which subtotal the role joins, and part-time is the only type the weighting applies to.

Getting these right matters when an assessor treats types differently. Many professional bodies count an internship at a reduced rate or not at all, and having each type broken out separately means you can present the figure their way without recalculating.

Counts as relevant

Ticked by default. Untick a role that would not count towards the specific requirement you are checking — a bar job during a computer science degree, for instance, when applying for a software role.

Relevance is a judgement, and it is yours to make. The calculator has no opinion about which of your roles qualify; it simply totals the ones you mark.

Required years and months

The threshold you are testing against. Leave both blank and the eligibility section does not appear at all, rather than showing a meaningless comparison against zero.

Measure against

Which of the three bases the requirement is tested on. If you are not sure which basis an employer means, run it on the strictest one you might be held to — usually relevant experience — so you are not surprised later.

Part-time weighting

A percentage applied to part-time days only. The default of 100% means no discount at all, which is how most employers treat part-time work. Set it to 50% if a rule counts half-time work at half rate, and so on.

Only change this if you have an actual rule to follow. Discounting your own part-time experience without being asked to simply understates your history.

Reading the results

Total work experience

The headline, in years, months and days, with the same figure below in total months, total days and decimal years. This is every role you entered, with overlaps merged.

Eligibility check

Appears only when you entered a requirement. It shows what was required, which basis was used, what you have on that basis, and the difference in either direction. When you fall short, it also projects the date you would reach the threshold if you stay continuously employed.

Experience by type

A row per employment type with the number of roles, the day count and the duration. Concurrent roles of the same type are merged within that type, so two simultaneous part-time jobs do not produce double the part-time days.

Underneath, relevant experience and weighted experience are shown as their own totals, so all three bases are visible at once.

Career analysis

Employers, roles, career span, longest and shortest role, and the number and total length of your gaps. Employers and roles are counted separately because two roles at the same company is one employer, and the distinction matters on a CV.

Gap table

Every gap with its start, end and exact length. It only appears when there are gaps to show.

Employment breakdown

Every role with its type, dates, duration and relevance flag. Check this before trusting any total.

Total, relevant and weighted

The three bases exist because employers and regulators genuinely mean different things, and the difference is often large.

Total experience

Every role, every type, overlaps merged. The broadest figure and the one most CVs quote. Appropriate when a form asks simply how long you have been working.

Relevant experience

Only the roles you marked relevant. This is what is meant by "five years of experience in this field", and it is usually the basis a hiring manager has in mind even when the advertisement does not say so. For most people it is meaningfully smaller than the total.

Weighted experience

Total, with part-time days counted at your chosen percentage. Relevant mainly to professional registrations and immigration categories that specify a full-time-equivalent calculation. Most ordinary job applications do not work this way, which is why the default leaves part-time counted in full.

All three are displayed together deliberately. Seeing that your total is seven years but your relevant experience is four tells you something important about how an application will be read, and it is better to know that before you submit than after.

How career gaps are measured

Gaps are derived, not entered. Your roles are merged into continuous runs of employment, and any period between one run ending and the next beginning is a gap.

Doing it this way has two advantages. A gap cannot be forgotten, since it falls out of the dates automatically. And the arithmetic is consistent: employed days plus gap days always equals your career span, so the three figures can be checked against one another.

Roles that touch exactly produce no gap. Leaving on 30 June and starting on 1 July is continuous employment, and the calculator treats it as one unbroken run rather than reporting a gap of zero days.

Only gaps between employments are counted. Time before your first job and after your most recent one is not a gap — it is simply outside your career span.

How the eligibility check works

The requirement is converted into days using average calendar lengths, then compared against your experience on the chosen basis:

The averages are the true mean lengths of a Gregorian year and month. Using them rather than 365 and 30 keeps a multi-year requirement from drifting by several days, which matters when you are close to a threshold.

When you fall short, the projected date is simply the calculation date plus the shortfall in days. It assumes continuous employment from that point, which is an assumption stated plainly on the result rather than buried.

One caution: this tells you whether your dates meet a numeric threshold. It does not tell you whether an assessor will agree that your roles qualify. That judgement belongs to whoever is assessing you.

Worked example: meeting a five-year requirement

Worked example: relevant experience only

Worked example: part-time weighting

Explaining a gap

A gap is not a problem. Being vague about one is.

Knowing the exact length changes how you talk about it. "A few months" invites a follow-up question; "four months between roles in 2021" does not. The gap table gives you the precise dates, which is what an interviewer will be looking at.

Short gaps between roles — a few weeks or a couple of months — are normal and almost never raised. Notice periods, handovers and start dates rarely align perfectly, and the calculator will often show a one-month gap that you had not thought of as a gap at all.

Longer gaps are worth being ready for. Study, caring responsibilities, illness, redundancy and deliberate breaks are all ordinary. What helps is knowing the dates precisely and having a one-sentence account prepared, rather than working it out under questioning.

If a gap involved activity that is genuinely relevant — a qualification, a substantial voluntary role, freelance work — consider entering it as a role with the appropriate type so it appears in your history rather than as empty space.

Full-time equivalent, explained

"Full-time equivalent", usually shortened to FTE, is the idea behind the weighting field, and it is worth understanding before you change that number.

An FTE figure expresses part-time work as the amount of full-time work it corresponds to. Someone working three days a week where full-time is five is 0.6 FTE. Two years at 0.6 FTE is 1.2 years of full-time equivalent experience, even though 24 months of calendar time passed.

Bodies that assess experience this way do so because they are measuring exposure to practice rather than elapsed time. A trainee seeing patients two days a week accumulates half the caseload of one seeing them four days a week, and a registration designed around competence reasonably reflects that.

To use the weighting correctly, work out your own ratio first: your contracted hours divided by the organisation's full-time hours, times one hundred. Someone on 21 hours where full-time is 35 enters 60. If several part-time roles had different ratios, the single flat percentage here cannot express that — split them out using the type breakdown and combine the figures yourself.

Most ordinary employment does not work this way. A hiring manager asking for five years is nearly always asking about elapsed time, not FTE. Applying an FTE discount to a normal job application simply understates your history, which is why the default is 100%.

Evidence you may be asked for

A calculated figure is only as useful as your ability to support it. Where experience determines eligibility, expect to evidence it.

Employment references stating exact start and end dates are the most commonly requested document. Ask for dates in writing when you leave a role rather than years later, when the person who knew you has moved on.

Payroll and tax records — payslips, annual statements, national insurance or social security records — are strong because they are contemporaneous and issued by a third party. They are also the usual fallback when a former employer no longer exists.

Contracts and offer letters establish the terms, including whether a role was full-time or part-time. This matters if you have applied a weighting: an assessor applying an FTE rule will want to see the contracted hours, not your recollection of them.

For contract and freelance work, evidence is usually invoices, signed statements of work, or client confirmation letters. Concurrent engagements are worth documenting carefully, because an assessor merging your dates the way this calculator does will arrive at a smaller figure than the sum of your contracts, and you want to be able to explain that difference rather than be caught by it.

Keep the entries here matching whatever you can actually produce. A figure you cannot evidence is a figure you should not quote.

Common scenarios

Professional registration

Registrations usually specify qualifying experience precisely, often post-qualification and often full-time-equivalent. Mark only the qualifying roles as relevant, set the weighting to whatever the rule says, and measure against the relevant or weighted basis.

Immigration and visa thresholds

These generally require experience in a specified occupation within a defined window, and may not count internships or unrelated work. Use the relevant basis and check the resulting figure against the published rule rather than assuming.

A job advertisement asking for N years

Advertisements rarely specify the basis. Check the relevant figure first, since that is what a hiring manager usually has in mind, and quote the total only where it is genuinely defensible.

Graduates with part-time work during study

Enter it, mark it part-time, and untick relevance if it was unrelated. It still forms part of your total and it fills what would otherwise look like a gap.

Contract and freelance histories

Contracting produces the messiest histories to assess, because engagements are short, frequently concurrent, and often separated by days rather than months. Enter every engagement with its real dates and let the merging handle the rest.

Two things usually surprise contractors. The first is that the merged total is smaller than the sum of the contracts, sometimes considerably, because concurrent work is counted once. The second is that very short breaks between engagements show up as career gaps — a fortnight between contracts is technically a gap, and a portfolio career can accumulate a dozen of them.

Neither is a problem, but both are worth knowing before an assessor raises them. Short inter-contract gaps are entirely normal in contracting and are read that way; what matters is that your total is defensible and that you can explain why it differs from the arithmetic sum of your contracts.

Career changers

The total-versus-relevant split is exactly the picture you need. It shows what an application in the new field will actually be assessed on, which is usually a much smaller number than your working life.

Returning after a break

The gap is measured precisely and your experience is unaffected by it — time out does not remove experience already gained.

Common mistakes

Quoting total experience when relevant is meant

The most consequential error here. If an employer means five years in the field and you quote nine years of everything, the mismatch surfaces at interview.

Applying a part-time discount nobody asked for

The default is 100% for good reason. Only reduce it when a written rule requires it.

Leaving every role marked relevant

If nothing is unticked, the relevant figure equals the total and tells you nothing. Take a moment over it.

Treating the eligibility result as a decision

It compares your dates against a number. Whether an assessor accepts your roles as qualifying is a separate judgement.

Using today rather than the closing date

Applications are assessed as at a stated date. If you are close to a threshold, this can be the difference between eligible and not.

Entering two roles at one employer as two employers

Use the same company name for both and the employer count stays correct, while both roles still appear separately.

Tips

• Fill in the employer name consistently. Employer counting is by name, so "Acme" and "Acme Ltd" are counted as two.
• Run the eligibility check on the strictest basis you might be held to, so nothing is a surprise later.
• Check the gap table before an interview and have a sentence ready for anything over a couple of months.
• Set the calculation date to the closing date whenever one exists.
• Keep your entries matching your CV exactly, so any figure you quote is supported by the history you show.
• Copy or print the result before clearing the form. Nothing is stored between visits.

Limitations

The calculator does not decide what qualifies. Employers, professional bodies and immigration authorities each define qualifying experience their own way, and those definitions differ and change. Marking a role relevant records your judgement; it does not make it an assessor's.

Part-time weighting is a single flat percentage applied to all part-time roles. A rule requiring actual hours per role, or different rates for different roles, is not modelled — split those roles and use the type breakdown to compute it manually if needed.

Experience is measured in elapsed days, not hours worked. Two part-time roles at very different hours count identically, so someone working one day a week and someone working four accumulate the same figure unless you apply a weighting yourself.

Unpaid leave or a suspension inside a single employment is not detected. If such a period should be excluded, split the role into two entries around it so the gap appears.

The eligible date projection assumes continuous employment from the calculation date. It is arithmetic on an assumption, not a forecast.

Frequently asked questions