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IT professional with 10+ years of experience.

Do I need to put "of" between "years" and "experience"? I would have put it without any doubt if I hadn't read a few examples without "of" in the book ACE the IT Resume: Resumes and Cover Letters to Get You Hired

Maksim Dmitriev
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2 Answers2

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10+ years of experience is proper. Units of time like years can also be used in a possessive sense, so you can also say 10+ years' experience. See this question and this question for more details about that.

In formal writing you should not use 10+ years experience without the apostrophe, but then you would not normally say "10+" in normal writing either. Résumé writing is a bit informal and has conventions of its own, such as frequent omission of articles and first person pronouns ("Implemented process that increased efficiency of widget production by 400 percent"). So you might be able to get away with years experience in that context. Still, you can't go wrong if you get it right: stick with either years of experience or years' experience.

Community
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phenry
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    If you wish to retain the possessive case, should not the equivalent of ten years' experience be experience of ten years? The man's coat is the same as the coat of the man. Saying ten years of experience is a bit like saying the man of the coat. I am no expert grammarian but I don't think ten years of experience is a simple possessive. I think it is an elliptical way of saying ten-years' worth of experience. – WS2 Jun 25 '14 at 23:06
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You certainly may include the “of” and so indicate that experience is a thing of which you have a certain quantity, namely (more than) ten years. An alternative is to write “10+ years’ experience,” which actually turns the possessive or genitive relation completely around: if we were to reconvert the possessive “years’ ” into periphrastic genitive with “of,” we would wind up with the experience of more than ten years, rather than more than ten years of experience. But it is remarkable how very little difference in meaning that makes.

Brian Donovan
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  • I agree and have said something similar in comment, independently of having read your answer. See below @phenry. Personally I don't believe ten years of experience is grammatically correct. Everyone knows what it means, and it doesn't matter. But strictly I think it is poor English. It is a bit like saying, as many do, 'a beauty of a landscape unfolded before my eyes. The possessive is entirely misplaced. Correctly one would say a beautiful landscape...*. – WS2 Jun 25 '14 at 23:20