How to write a resume with no experience for your first job

Everyone’s first resume has the same problem: the “Experience” section looks empty. Employers hiring for internships and entry-level roles know this and do not expect years of work. They look for signs that you learn quickly, show up reliably and can do the work, and your resume should put those signs where a quick reader finds them.

The steps below work the same whether you are at university, just graduated or looking for your first job after school. If you are still in high school, our guide to a high school student resume is closer to your situation.

Do you need a resume for your first job?

It depends on the job, but it is worth having one either way.

• Usually asked for: internships, graduate programmes, office jobs and most roles advertised on job sites. Online application forms often have an upload step, and some fill in their fields from the file you upload.
• Often not asked for: first jobs in shops, cafés, restaurants, warehouses and seasonal work are often filled through a short online form or a conversation with the manager.

Even for those, a one-page resume helps. You can leave it with the manager when you ask about work in person, it shows you took the application seriously, and when a form asks for your dates, school and availability you have them ready in one place. You will also reuse it: your next application starts from it instead of from nothing.

What employers look for in a first resume

For entry-level roles, recruiters usually scan for:

• What you studied and when you finish.
• Proof you can do something real: a project, an internship, a part-time job, a competition.
• Relevant skills: tools, languages, certificates.
• Reliability and responsibility: holding a job while studying, leading a club, organising an event.
• Clear direction: the kind of role you are applying for.

You can show every one of these without a full-time job.

The best order for a resume with little experience

1. Header: name, target role, email, phone, city, LinkedIn or portfolio.
2. Summary: two or three sentences on who you are and what you want.
3. Education: your strongest section for now, so it goes first.
4. Projects: academic, personal or open-source work.
5. Experience: internships, part-time jobs, volunteering.
6. Skills and languages.
7. Optional: certificates, awards, activities.

Once you have a year or two of relevant work, move experience above education.

If you are still studying, say when you can start. One line in the header or at the end of the summary answers the first question a recruiter has:

Available for a full-time role from July 2027

Available 15 to 20 hours a week during term, full-time in the summer

Write a summary that gives direction

Without much experience, the summary tells the reader what you are aiming for and why it makes sense.

Weak: Hard-working student looking for any opportunity to gain experience.

Strong: Final-year marketing student (graduating June 2027) with a social media internship and a campus project that grew a student club’s Instagram audience. Comfortable with Canva, Meta Business Suite and Google Analytics. Looking for a marketing assistant or internship role.

More examples are in our resume summary guide.

Make education work harder

For a first resume, education can take more space than it will later. Include:

• Degree, school, city and dates (expected graduation if you are still studying).
• A strong grade, if it is genuinely strong. If not, leave it out.
• Relevant courses, but only three to five, and only those that match the job.
• A thesis or capstone project, with one line on what you did and found.
• Exchange semesters, scholarships or honours.

On the page, that can be as short as this:

BSc Economics, Northgate University, Manchester · 2023–2027 (expected)

• Relevant courses: Econometrics, Financial Accounting, Data Visualisation
• Dissertation: how bus fare caps changed commuting in three cities, using public transport data in R

Leave high school off once your degree is well under way, unless the school is well known or relevant to the role; our education guide explains when high school stays on a resume. The same guide covers grades, expected dates and unfinished degrees in more detail.

Projects: your best substitute for experience

Projects prove you can apply what you learned. Treat each one like a job entry: give it a title and some context (“Inventory app, team project for the Software Engineering course”), say what you did rather than what the team did, and end with the result: what you built, what it achieved, who used it.

Inventory tracking app · Software Engineering course, spring 2026

• Built the backend in Node.js and PostgreSQL for a four-person team.
• Designed the stock alerts feature; the campus café used the app for the rest of the semester.

Personal projects count too: a website you built, a YouTube channel you grew, an app you published, a research poster, an event you organised.

Every kind of experience counts

Do not leave out work because it seems unrelated. A part-time job in a café or a shop shows reliability, customer service and working under pressure. Describe it with results, like any other job:

Barista, Coffee Lab, Lisbon · 2024–2026 (part-time)

• Served up to 200 customers per shift during morning rush.
• Trained four new team members on the till and opening routine.

Also include:

• Internships, even short ones.
• Volunteering: with an organisation, a dates range and what you did.
• Student clubs and societies, especially roles with responsibility (treasurer, event lead).
• Freelance or family business work, described honestly.

Turning duties into bullets

Most first drafts list duties. Add a number, a responsibility or a result and the same job reads differently:

Before: Worked at the checkout.

After: Ran the checkout on Saturday shifts and cashed up the till at closing, with no discrepancies over two years.

Before: Tutored students.

After: Tutored five secondary school students in maths each week; four moved up at least one grade by the end of the year.

Before: Member of the debate club.

After: Organised the debate club’s first inter-university tournament: booked rooms, recruited 12 judges and ran the schedule for 60 participants.

Before: Group project on market research.

After: Designed the survey and analysed 240 responses in Excel for a four-person market research project; presented the findings to the client, a local gym.

If you have almost nothing to list yet

Then create something in the next few weeks. A small piece of real work aimed at the job you want is worth more than another course on the list:

• Analyst roles: take a public dataset, answer one question with it and publish a one-page write-up with a chart.
• Marketing roles: run social media for a club, a charity or a family business for a month and report what changed.
• Developer roles: build a small app that solves a real problem and put the code on GitHub.
• Admin and operations roles: volunteer to organise an event, a fundraiser or a club’s finances.

Then list it under Projects or Volunteering with a date and one result, like any other entry. If time has passed since you graduated, our guide on employment gaps covers how to show it.

Skills you can prove

List the skills that match the job and that you can back up: software, programming languages, design tools, data tools, languages with levels, a driver’s license if the job needs one. Keep soft skills out of the list and show them in your projects and jobs instead. Our skills section guide explains how to choose and group them.

Format: one page, clean and standard

• One page. You do not need more yet. See how long should a resume be.
• Standard section titles (Education, Projects, Experience, Skills) so both people and software find them. More in the ATS resume guide.
• A simple template. Clean one-column templates like Linden work well for a first resume.
• A text-based PDF with a clear file name: FirstName-LastName-Resume.pdf.
• A professional email address. Something like firstname.lastname@example.com works better than the nickname address you made at fourteen.

Example outline of a first resume

Here is how a complete one-page resume for a graduate might be organised. Use it as a skeleton and replace every line with your own details.

Section	What goes in it
Header	Name, “Junior Data Analyst”, email, phone, city, LinkedIn
Summary	Degree and graduation date, one internship, two key tools, the role you want
Education	BSc Economics, university, 2023–2027 (expected), thesis topic, three relevant courses
Projects	Two projects, each with your role and one result
Experience	Summer internship (three bullets), part-time job (two bullets)
Skills	Excel, SQL, Python (pandas), Power BI, statistics
Languages	English (C1), Spanish (B1)
Activities	Treasurer of the economics society, 2025–2026

That fits comfortably on one page and gives the reader something concrete in every section. As soon as you land your first full-time role, it moves to the top of the experience section and education moves down. To see a finished version, look at the data analyst resume example.

Common mistakes on a first resume

• Apologising for no experience. Never write “Although I have no experience…”. Lead with what you have.
• An “objective” that is only about you. “To gain experience in a dynamic company” tells the reader nothing. Name the role you want and one reason you fit it.
• Listing every course. Pick the three to five that match the job.
• Leaving out part-time jobs because they feel unrelated. They show reliability; give each one or two bullets.
• Spelling mistakes. For an entry-level role, attention to detail is part of what is being judged. Read it aloud once, and ask someone else to read it too.
• The same resume for every application. Adjust the summary, projects and skills to each role; our guide on tailoring a resume shows how.

Quick checklist

• Header with a target role and professional email
• Two or three sentence summary with clear direction
• Education near the top, with expected graduation date
• At least one project described with your role and result
• Part-time jobs, internships and volunteering included
• Skills you can prove, languages with levels
• One page, standard titles, text-based PDF

Build your first resume

You can make your first resume in AlderCV without creating an account: pick a template, fill in your details with the tips shown next to each field, and download a watermark-free PDF when you are ready (you will only need an account to download). Your first resume is free, and the full walk-through for every section is in how to write a resume.