Experience With or In? (What about “On” or “Of”)

Vocabulary / By

The noun “experience” can be used with the prepositions “with”,” in”, and “of” depending on the context. 

  • We use “experience in” for the context of a field of study or work.
  • We use “experience with” to describe the tools you use.
  • We use “experience of” for personal physical experiences. 
  • We use “experience at” for specific activities.

When we use the word “experience”, the preposition that follows it can change depending on the context but the the meaning of the word doesn’t change.

Let’s look now at the word “experience”  with different prepositions,

Experience In

We use “experience in” when discussing a particular field of work. 

I also have experience in marketing.

He has experience in sales. 

Notice that we don’t use “experience in” with broad fields such as science.

I have experience in science

I have experience in Microbiology.

Experience With

“Experience with” is more common when you have used something(it could be physical or a piece of software).

I have some experience with Microsoft Word.

I have experience with children.

Often we use the word “working” between “experience” and “with”.

I have experience working with children.

Experience Of

We use “Experience Of” when talking about more of a physical experience which is often something related to hardship.

I have firsthand experience of poverty.

I have experience of what real hunger is, I know what it feels like.   

Experience At

We use “experience at” when talking about a specific place of work.

I have 6 years’ experience at Barclays Bank

Experience On

“On” is not a preposition that we use in connection with the word “experience”.

“On” will however appear after “experience” when “on” is needed as a preposition in the sentence(on is not a dependent preposition).

We have a lot of experience on this team.

We have a lot of experience on this matter. 

In these examples ”on” is used to connect “team” and “matter” and the word “experience”.

Experience At or In a Company

We usually use “experience at” a company as a company is a specific place or to talk about a period of time that you worked somewhere.

My experience at Chase allowed me to learn about systems and processes. 

We often use “in” to describe being inside a volume and that could be physical or metaphorical.

My experience in the office environment wasn’t the best.

Year + Experience

When many people are writing resumés they have difficulty writing the word year with experience. The key is that you need to use the apostrophe before the “s” for singular year and after the “s” for years. You can find more information in the full article I wrote about that here. 

 

Conor
Latest posts by Conor (see all)