How to write a CV with no experience

A CV with no paid experience is not an empty CV. Employers hiring for first roles are not looking for a career — they are looking for evidence that you turn up, learn quickly and can be trusted with something. That evidence exists in more places than the work history section.

Change the order of the page

When experience is thin, the document's shape changes:

1. Contact details
2. A short summary that states what you are and what you want
3. Education — now above experience
4. Projects, coursework or volunteering — the substitute for a work history
5. Any paid or part-time work, however ordinary
6. Skills, including languages, software and certificates

Where the evidence actually is

• Coursework and dissertations. A final-year project is a project: a question, a method, a deadline, an output. "Researched and wrote a 10,000-word dissertation on X, running 14 interviews and coding the transcripts" is a real bullet.
• Part-time and holiday jobs. Bar work, retail, delivery, tutoring, warehouse shifts. They prove reliability, customer handling, cash responsibility, working under pressure. A supermarket job is not a gap; it is evidence of stamina.
• Volunteering. Committee roles, coaching, fundraising, food banks, student societies. Treasurers manage budgets; secretaries run schedules; captains manage people.
• Self-directed work. A portfolio, a GitHub repository, a small business, a blog with an audience, a qualification you finished on your own.
• Competitions, hackathons, open days, exchanges. All of them are things with a start, a team and a result.

The summary for a first CV

Three lines: what you are studying or have finished, what you are aiming at, and one piece of proof.

"Final-year psychology student at Leeds, applying for assistant psychologist roles. Ran a 14-participant study end to end and spent two summers as a support worker in a residential setting."

No adjectives. No "passionate". No "seeking a challenging opportunity".

Skills to put on a CV with no experience

Be specific and be honest:

• Software you can genuinely use: Excel (including formulas and pivot tables), SPSS, Photoshop, Google Analytics.
• Languages with a level.
• Certificates: first aid, food hygiene, driving licence, Safeguarding, Health and Safety, coding course.
• Written work: reports, essays, published writing, documentation.
• Customer-facing experience counted plainly: "two years of face-to-face customer service in retail".

Leave out "hard-working", "team player", "fast learner". Every candidate writes those, so they carry no information.

Worked example bullets

Retail assistant, 18 months, weekends during college: "Served 100+ customers per shift on the busiest department in the store, and trained two new starters on the till and returns process."

Society treasurer: "Managed a £4,000 budget for a 120-member society, introducing a simple tracking sheet that removed the annual overspend."

Dissertation: "Designed and ran a 14-participant study, recruiting volunteers, conducting interviews and presenting findings to a panel of three academics."

Volunteer football coach: "Coached a under-12s team twice weekly for a season, planning sessions for 16 players and organising transport for away fixtures."

None of those are impressive because of the size. They are impressive because they are specific, and because they show someone who does things properly.

Then be honest about the gap

Do not pretend a two-month internship was a career. Instead, use the interview to say what you learned and what you want to learn next. Every hiring manager for a first role knows the CV is thin on paper — they are reading for trajectory, not history.

One more thing worth doing

Before you send anything, find three job adverts for the role you want and copy the words they repeat into your summary and skills — only where they are true. That closes most of the gap between "no experience" and "not relevant".

If you want the structure and wording handled for you, paste your CV or notes into the improver — it will build them into a proper CV, and you can read it before paying anything.