Graduate schemes

How to Write a CV With No Work Experience

What to put on a CV when you have no paid work experience: structure, extracurriculars, coursework and how to write about them without inflating anything.

Almost every graduate CV guide assumes you already have something to put under "experience," and most first-time applicants do not. This is normal rather than a problem to disguise. The fix is not to invent a job; it is to write about what you actually did, at whatever scale it happened, with the same discipline a CV with ten years of work history uses.

Start from what you actually have

Most students underestimate how much material they already have. Before assuming the CV will be thin, list out, without editing yet:

• Every module, project, dissertation or group assignment with a specific, gradeable output.
• Every society, sports team, or student group you held any role in, even an unofficial one.
• Any volunteering, tutoring, or unpaid work, however informal.
• Any competition, hackathon, case challenge or Model UN-style event you entered.
• Part-time or seasonal work, even if it feels unrelated to the job you want. Retail, hospitality and admin roles all demonstrate reliability, customer handling and working under time pressure, which is exactly what a graduate employer is actually screening for at this stage.

Almost everyone finds more here than they expected. The work is then writing about it properly, not searching for something else to add.

Structure: education leads, everything else follows

With no paid work history to build a section around, education takes the top of the page and stays there through most of your degree. Below it:

1. Education: institution, degree, grade or classification, relevant modules, dissertation title if genuinely interesting.
2. Projects and coursework: a graded group project, a dissertation with a real dataset, a coding assignment: anything with a defined scope and outcome.
3. Extracurricular activities and leadership: society roles, sports, competitions, with scale attached wherever you can state it honestly (membership numbers, budget, team size, placement).
4. Work and volunteering: anything paid or unpaid, described by what you did rather than by the job title alone.
5. Skills and languages: tools you can actually use, and language levels stated honestly.

This is close to the section order our graduate scheme CV format guide describes for early-career applicants generally; the difference here is simply that projects and activities carry more of the CV's weight because there is less paid history to lean on.

Writing about extracurriculars like they are work, because they are

The single biggest improvement most first CVs need is treating a society role or a project the way an experience bullet treats a job: action verb, what you did, the scale of it, and the outcome. "Member of the finance society" tells the reader very little. "Organised a six-week trading simulation for 40 members, coordinating with three guest speakers" says a great deal, and it is not a stretch, just a more specific description of the same real thing.

The same applies to coursework. "Group project on market entry strategy" is a title, not a bullet. "Led a four-person team analysing a market-entry case for a consumer goods company, presenting a recommendation to a panel of two lecturers" describes what actually happened, and a reader can picture the skill being used.

What not to do

The temptation with a thin CV is to inflate: to turn a two-week group project into "managed a cross-functional team," or a single volunteering afternoon into an ongoing "leadership role." This backfires specifically because the CV is thin; a recruiter reading a one-page CV with only four or five entries reads each one closely, and a claim that does not survive a follow-up question at interview costs you more credibility than an honestly modest CV would have.

This is the exact reasoning behind why tailoring a resume is not the same as inventing one: reordering and rewording what genuinely happened, so a reader sees the most relevant parts first, is fair game. Adding scale, outcomes or responsibilities that were never there is a different act entirely, and it is the one a fabrication check is built to stop.

Length

Keep it to one page. A CV padded to fill space with generic sentences ("responsible for various tasks," "worked well in a team") reads worse than a shorter, denser page with four or five properly written entries. Our CV length by country guide covers where the one- versus two-page line sits once you have more history to work with; at this stage, one page dense with specifics beats two pages padded to look substantial.

Putting it together

The practical order of work:

1. List every project, society role, competition and piece of paid or unpaid work you have, without editing yet.
2. Rewrite each one as a verb-scope-outcome bullet, using only detail you can defend.
3. Put education at the top, projects and activities next, then any paid or volunteer work.
4. Cut anything that does not survive being asked "tell me more about that" at interview.

In Involve Resume, when a bullet is missing a number or a scale, the app asks you a direct question rather than inventing one, so your first CV gets more specific with each pass instead of more exaggerated. Start with the sample resume or your own on the job board to see how a first CV scores against a real graduate posting.