How to Write a CV With No Work Experience
The advice "just list your experience" is unhelpful when the honest answer is that you do not have any. But "no experience" almost always means "no paid, full-time, relevant experience", and that is a much smaller gap than it feels like.
Here is what to do with the material you actually have.
Change the order
For a first CV, put education above experience. It is your strongest section, and the top third of the page should always hold your strongest material.
A first-CV structure that works:
- Contact details
- Short summary — what you are studying or trained in, and the role you want
- Education — including relevant modules and your final project
- Projects — coursework, personal, or academic
- Experience — any paid work at all, relevant or not
- Skills
- Volunteering, societies, certifications
The moment you have a year or so of relevant work, experience moves back above education and stays there.
Write the summary as a direction, not a history
With no track record to summarise, the summary states what you are aiming at and what you can already do. Two or three lines.
Vague: "Recent graduate looking for an opportunity to grow and develop my skills in a professional environment."
Better: "Computer science graduate focused on backend development. Built and deployed a REST API serving a 30,000-record dataset as my final project, and ran the university coding society's weekly workshops for two terms. Looking for a junior backend role."
The second names a technology, a scale, a duration, and a target. None of it required a job.
Education, expanded
With no work history, this section carries more weight, so give it more than one line.
Include:
- Degree or qualification, institution, dates
- Your grade, if it helps you
- Three or four relevant modules — the ones that map to the job, not all of them
- Your dissertation or final project, with one line on what it did
That last one is often the single best item on a first CV. It is real, sustained, independent work with a result, which is exactly what employers look for in experience — it just was not paid.
BSc Computer Science, University of X, 2022–2025 — First class Relevant modules: Databases, Distributed Systems, Software Engineering Final project: a route-planning service for campus shuttle data, in Go with PostgreSQL. Achieved sub-100ms responses on ~50,000 stops.
Projects count, if you describe them like work
A project section is where a first CV gets competitive. It does not matter that nobody paid you; it matters that you built something and can talk about the decisions.
Describe them the way you would describe a job — what it does, what you chose, what the outcome was:
Personal budgeting app — React and Firebase, ~40 users from a student forum. Rewrote the sync logic after early users reported duplicated entries on flaky connections, which cut duplicate reports to zero over six weeks.
That bullet demonstrates shipping, listening to users, diagnosing a real bug, and verifying a fix. It is worth more than "familiar with React".
Avoid listing a tutorial you followed. If the work was reproducing someone else's steps, it does not show independent judgement, and an interviewer will find that out in one question.
Unpaid work that legitimately counts
All of this is experience and belongs on the page:
- Volunteering — especially anything with responsibility, money, or people
- Society or club roles — treasurer, events lead, captain
- Freelance or commission work, even one-off and small
- Family business help — often substantial and routinely omitted
- Open-source contributions, however small
- Tutoring — paid or informal
- Competitions and hackathons, including ones you did not win
Describe them with the same action-and-result structure as a job. "Society treasurer" says nothing; "Managed a £4,000 annual budget across eleven events and moved the accounts off spreadsheets onto shared software" says quite a lot.
Non-relevant jobs are still worth listing
If you have worked in retail, hospitality, or a warehouse and are applying for an office role, list it. It shows you have held a job, turned up, and dealt with people — which is not nothing to an employer hiring their first junior.
Keep it short and pull out the transferable part:
Barista, Coffee Shop Name, 2023–2024 (part-time) Trained four new starters on the till and opening routine. Handled the morning rush alone twice a week, roughly 120 customers per shift.
One or two lines. Do not stretch it, and do not apologise for it either.
Skills: be honest about level
The temptation is to list everything you have ever touched. Resist it, because every item invites a question.
Split by confidence if it helps — "Confident: Python, SQL. Familiar: Docker, AWS." That reads as self-aware rather than overreaching, and it protects you from being asked to design a Kubernetes cluster on the basis of one weekend tutorial.
What to leave off
- Secondary school results, once you have a degree
- "Hardworking team player with excellent communication skills" and every variation
- Skills rating bars
- A photo, in most markets
- Hobbies, unless they genuinely connect to the role
Length
One page. Firmly one page. A two-page CV with no work history reads as padding, and padding is visible.
If you cannot fill a page, widen the margins slightly, give education and projects more detail, and stop. A tight three-quarter page is far better than a stretched two.
Then rehearse the follow-ups
A first CV rests on a small number of items — a final project, a society role, one significant piece of coursework — which means the interview will go deep on each of them rather than broad across many.
That is good news, because there are only a handful of things to prepare. It is also the specific thing most first-time candidates have never practised: being asked "walk me through that project and why you built it that way" and answering for two minutes without trailing off.
Write the CV first. Then say every bullet on it out loud, to someone who asks follow-up questions, until the answers stop being a surprise.