How to Write a CV With No Experience
3 min read·Updated 1 Nov 2025
Almost nobody writing their first CV has no experience. What they usually have is experience they have not recognised as relevant: a part-time job, a university project, a society they ran, a family business they helped in, a course they completed on their own time.
The work is in reframing that material so a reader can see what it demonstrates, and in structuring the page so that what you do have appears where it will be read.
What counts
- Part-time and seasonal work — retail, hospitality, delivery, tutoring. This demonstrates reliability, customer contact and working under pressure, all of which employers genuinely value.
- Academic projects, particularly a dissertation or a final-year project with a defined output.
- Volunteering of any kind, including for a family business, a religious organisation or a community group.
- Society and club roles — treasurer, captain, events organiser. Running a budget or a rota is real experience.
- Self-directed learning with something to show for it: a course with a certificate, a project you built, a portfolio.
- Caring responsibilities. Coordinating care for a relative involves organisation and advocacy, and saying so is legitimate.
Structuring a first CV
Put education first — it is your strongest material, and at this stage a reader expects to see it. Follow it with whichever of projects, experience or volunteering is most relevant to the role you are applying for.
Use a short profile at the top rather than a summary of experience you do not yet have. Two or three lines: what you have studied, what you are looking for, and one thing that makes you a credible candidate.
Writing about a project
Treat an academic or personal project exactly as you would a job: what the problem was, what you did, and what the outcome was.
Weak
Final year project on machine learning.
Stronger
Built a model to predict which library books would be requested during exam periods, using three years of loan data; the model informed a change to how reserved stock was allocated across two campuses, and the write-up was marked at 76%.
It has a problem, a method, a real-world consequence and an external assessment. That is a piece of professional work, and it reads as one.
Writing about a part-time job
The mistake is dismissing it. Retail and hospitality work is often described apologetically, as though the writer knows it is not the real thing. A reader takes their cue from you.
Weak
Worked as a waiter. Duties included taking orders and serving food.
Stronger
Worked front of house in a 90-cover restaurant across two summers, handling the Saturday evening service with two colleagues, training four new starters, and covering shift close and cash reconciliation.
Scale, responsibility, training others and money handling. Every one of those transfers.
What not to do
- Do not pad with a long list of soft skills. "Team player, hardworking, quick learner" appears on every first CV and is read as filler.
- Do not invent experience. It is checked more often than people expect and it ends the application permanently.
- Do not include school-level detail beyond the qualifications themselves once you have a degree.
- Do not use a design-heavy template to fill space. A well-spaced single page is not something to apologise for.
- Do not write a long objective about what you hope to gain. Employers are recruiting for what you can do.
Questions
Should my CV be one page?
Can I include a course I completed online?
How do I get experience if every job asks for it?
Put this into practice
The editor keeps your CV as structured content, so the section order and wording decisions in this guide are easy to apply and easy to change again.