How to Write a CV with No Work Experience

A CV without work experience should show what you can already do through education, projects, volunteering and responsibilities. You do not need to invent a job title or apologise for being a student. You need to make your evidence relevant to the role you want.

Start with one real vacancy. A first CV for a marketing internship should not read exactly like a CV for a laboratory placement. Keep the same facts, but change which examples you explain first and how much space each receives.

Open a blank document and list things you have actually completed. Include a course assignment, a student society event, a family business responsibility, a volunteering activity or a personal project. For each, answer three questions: what needed doing, what did you personally do, and what could someone inspect or ask you about?

Suppose a vacancy asks for organisation and spreadsheet skills. “Organised and proficient in Excel” makes two claims without support. A student who maintained a society's event registrations could explain how they checked duplicate entries, separated confirmed and waiting-list attendees, and handed the organiser a usable list. That is relevant evidence even if the work was unpaid.

Do not turn routine participation into leadership. Attending an event is different from coordinating it; completing a team project is different from building every part yourself. A smaller, accurate contribution gives you something credible to discuss at interview.

The National Careers Service recognises education, projects and volunteering as useful material for an early-career CV. A practical order for your first draft is contact details, a short role-specific introduction if useful, education, selected projects, other experience and skills.

This is a starting point, not a compulsory template. If you have substantial volunteering directly related to the vacancy, move it above an unrelated academic project. If the application asks for a particular format or page limit, follow that instruction.

Keep contact information simple: your name, a working email address and a phone number with the country code when applying internationally. Add a professional profile or portfolio only when it strengthens the application and is ready to be read. Check destination conventions before adding personal information or a photograph.

The following extract is illustrative. It describes a fictional undergraduate applying for an operations internship; it is not a record of a real student's achievements.

Profile

Business undergraduate interested in operations support, with experience organising student event registrations and checking spreadsheet records. Seeking an internship involving coordination, reporting and reliable follow-through.

Education

Bachelor of Commerce, expected completion 2027. Relevant coursework: business statistics and operations management. Include your actual institution and qualification details in your version.

Selected project — student event registration process

Additional responsibility — student society

Skills

Spreadsheet filtering and basic formulas, demonstrated in the registration project; written coordination, demonstrated through event updates.

Notice what this example leaves out: invented revenue, an inflated management title and a percentage improvement nobody measured. The work is modest, but the reader can understand it. If you have a genuine measured result, include it with enough context to explain what was measured.

Use a task, your action and a result or output. The result can be a completed handover, a tested prototype or a corrected dataset. It does not have to be a dramatic business outcome.

For a team project, identify your own section. “Created the questionnaire and checked incomplete responses for our group research assignment” is more defensible than “Led market research” when leadership was shared. Keep the group context where it matters.

If all your examples are classroom exercises, label them as coursework. If you completed a simulation, call it a simulation. A course certificate shows completion; it does not establish employment with the organisation whose name appears on the course.

Read each essential requirement and underline the passage in your CV that addresses it. Where there is no evidence, decide whether the requirement is something you can reasonably develop or a genuine eligibility barrier. Do not solve the gap by adding an unsupported adjective.

Then remove material that competes with your strongest examples. A long objective about “working in a challenging environment” usually tells the employer less than two lines about a relevant project. Keep school-level details only where they help explain your current qualifications or the employer requests them.

Finally, export the requested file format and reopen it. Check dates, spelling, links and whether the text remains readable. Ask another person to identify your intended role and strongest evidence without an explanation from you. If they cannot, revise the opening and section order.

If you need to build more evidence before applying, our guide to building a profile without work experience covers that longer-term task. For this CV, use the work you can explain honestly today.

Bring your course projects, volunteering and a target vacancy to a career discussion. We can help you plan the application around the evidence you have.