Career Calculator

Total experience is not one number — it is several, depending on who is asking. In Korean hiring, the anchor document is the 경력증명서 (career certificate) each former employer issues, stating your exact start and end dates; recruiters and HR add these periods in year-month units and typically drop leftover days. Watch the ordinal convention: 연차 counts the year you are in, so someone with 2 years and 3 months of employment is in their 3년차 (third year) but has 경력 2년 (two full years of experience). Quoting "3년차" when a job posting demands "경력 3년 이상" overstates you by up to a year, and salary bands (and 호봉 steps in seniority-pay systems) are keyed to full years completed. Statutory tenure normally includes probation (수습) from day one, since Korean law treats it as part of the employment relationship. Japan draws a sharp line between 勤続年数 — continuous years at one company, which drives retirement allowances and long-service benefits — and total career experience listed period by period in the 職務経歴書. English-market resumes and applicant tracking systems care about a third framing: "5+ years of X", where recruiters usually count only time actually doing X, not total time employed. Before a salary negotiation, compute your total with exact dates from your certificates rather than from memory. A candidate who says "about four years" invites rounding down; one who says "3 years 11 months across two companies, verifiable" leaves no room for it.

This tool works in a deliberately simple way: it counts the exact number of days in each position, sums them, then converts using 365 days per year and 30 days per month. That is ideal for a quick resume figure, but it is not how payroll and legal systems count, and the differences are worth understanding. Calendar (anniversary-based) counting, which HR systems use, anchors to dates: employment from March 1, 2023 to February 29, 2024 is "11 months and 29 days" by day-count conversion, but a system that checks whether the anniversary date has been reached may call it a few days short of one year — and that distinction can decide whether a one-year benefit threshold is met. Conversely, day-count conversion quietly accumulates drift: 366-day leap years each donate an extra day, so ten calendar years of continuous service converts to 10 years and 2–3 "days" here. The second difference is the inclusive final day. Legal tenure in most jurisdictions runs through the last working day inclusive: a contract from January 1 to December 31 is one full year, 365 days. A plain subtraction of the two dates yields 364, one short. This calculator subtracts dates, so if your goal is legal service length, set the end date to the day after the final working day, or simply expect the result to read one day low per position. For contracts, severance, or litigation, always restate the question in exact calendar dates and let the governing document define the counting rule — the convenient conversion here is an estimate, not an authority.

Position A: 2020-03-02 -> 2022-08-31   = 912 days
Position B: 2022-10-04 -> today (2026-07-02) = 1,367 days
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Total                                   = 2,279 days

Conversion used by this tool:
  2279 / 365          = 6 years, remainder 89 days
  89 / 30             = 2 months, remainder 29 days
  Result              = 6y 2m 29d

Inclusive-last-day counting (legal style) would add
1 day to Position A -> totals can differ by a day per job.

Each position row above is summed independently, which has one important consequence: overlapping periods are double-counted. If you freelanced from June to December while still holding a full-time job, entering both as-is credits you those seven months twice. For a resume total that a background check must survive, merge overlapping intervals first — count each calendar day at most once — and keep the side work as a separate line item described in text instead. Gaps work the other way: they simply do not accumulate, and nothing here penalizes them. The scrutiny gaps receive is human, not arithmetic. Most recruiters ignore short breaks between jobs; gaps beyond roughly six months tend to draw a question in interviews, and the strongest answer is a factual one-liner (care work, study, relocation, a shipped side project) rather than an apology. Note that some formal processes — Korean public-sector 경력 환산 tables are an example — recognize certain non-employment periods differently from private recruiters, so the same history can convert to different totals in different systems. What to include is a judgment call that depends on the audience. Internships, military service, part-time work, and freelancing all legitimately belong in a total when they involved the skill being claimed; some HR schemes convert part-time periods at a ratio (for instance, half credit for half-time) rather than full length. The honest pattern is to compute two numbers with this tool: total time employed, and time actually doing the work the posting asks for. Quote the second in applications; keep the first for forms that ask for raw employment history.

Exact tenure is worth money at specific thresholds, and knowing where they sit turns this calculator into a planning tool. In Korea, statutory severance pay (퇴직금) equals roughly 30 days of average wages per year of continuous service, but only vests after one full year of employment at 15 or more hours per week — resigning at 11 months forfeits it entirely. Annual paid leave follows the Labor Standards Act: 15 days upon completing one year, one additional day per two further years, capped at 25; during the first year, workers accrue one day per completed month, up to 11. Japan's Labor Standards Act grants 10 paid leave days after six months of service (with 80% attendance), scaling to 20 days at six and a half years. Retirement allowances there reward long tenure through taxation: the retirement-income deduction accumulates at 400,000 yen per year of service for the first 20 years and 700,000 yen per year beyond that, which is one reason Japanese career advice still treats the 20-year mark as meaningful. China's Labor Contract Law entitles employees to economic compensation of one month's wage per year of service on qualifying terminations, with half a month for periods of six months or less, and paid annual leave starts at 5 days after one cumulative year. The US, by contrast, mandates no severance or paid leave federally; tenure instead gates things like 401(k) employer-match vesting, commonly on cliffs of up to three years. Rules like these change and carve out exceptions, so treat the dates you compute here as a checklist prompt, and confirm current law or your employment contract — or ask a labor attorney or your HR department — before making a resignation date decision that hangs on a threshold.