A narrative essay is like a short story that explores a personal experience that changed your behavior, thinking or feelings. Your main reason for creating a narrative essay isn't just telling an interesting yarn, it's showing the reader the influence of a particular event on your life. The personal narrative makes a point or shares a dominant impression, recreates the event for the reader, presents important changes and conflict, features tension and relates the events of experience in sequential order.
Before beginning a personal narrative about the significance of your work experience, you should first choose a single event from work that would make an interesting story. The event should have some significance to your life. For example, it might have been a decision you needed to make, such as accepting a promotion, or a challenge you faced, such as impressing a company executive. Perhaps the incident involved an influence in your life like a boss or co-worker who showed you the ropes at a new company. Maybe you had to reform your bad habits or negative behavior like coming in late to work or drinking too much coffee at break time.
Instead of telling your readers about your work experience, show them your work experience with concrete details. For example, instead of writing that you worked in a noisy office, describe the noises you heard, such as workers tapping on their computer keys, telephones ringing and co-workers chatting. Personal narratives can include dialog. If your essay is about an influential manager with a funny personality, don't tell the reader that the manager was funny, show that he was funny through humorous dialogue. If your essay is about the time you really impressed the manager from the Cincinnati office in spite of a bad case of nerves, show the reader your nervousness by describing symptoms such as an upset stomach or sweaty armpits.
Tone is the overall feeling you want readers to experience as they read your essay. The tone can be serious, funny, hallucinatory, scary, nervous or something else. You can establish the tone through your choice of words and description. For example, in his novel "The Rum Diary," Hunter S. Thompson establishes an alcohol-soaked tone with his description of the story's main bar, Al's Backyard: "At first he served nothing but beer...and rum...It was a pleasant place to drink, especially in the morning...." The tone you choose for your essay should relate in some way to the point you are trying to convey. If your essay is about a mentor who died, you may want to use a more serious tone than you would in an essay about feeling nervous before an important meeting.