How to Write a CV with No Experience

Every first CV starts the same way, with an empty space where the work history is supposed to go. If you're a student, a school leaver or a recent graduate, that blank can feel like proof you've nothing to offer. It isn't. The fix isn't to invent experience or pad the page with filler, it's to recognise the evidence you already have and build the page around it. You've done more than you think, and this guide is about naming it and putting it in an order that reads well.

What actually counts as experience

Here's the reframe that changes everything: an employer reading a junior CV isn't hunting for job titles, because they know you don't have many yet. They're reading for evidence of skills, the same skills a first job would need. Reliability, working with people, handling responsibility, seeing something through to the end. You can show every one of those without ever having been formally employed.

Start with your studies, because they're real work you can point to. A dissertation or a final-year project is months of self-directed effort: you scoped it, researched it, hit deadlines and produced something at the end. That's project management, whatever the subject happens to be. Coursework, presentations and group assignments count too, especially where you can name what you personally did rather than what the group produced.

Then look wider. Volunteering shows commitment and, often, genuine responsibility. A society role (treasurer, events officer, committee member) is leadership and organisation by another name. Captaining a team, or simply turning up to train twice a week for three seasons, shows the reliability employers are quietly desperate for. And part-time or casual work carries far more than people give it credit for. A Saturday job on a till is customer handling, cash responsibility and keeping your head when the queue is out the door. Bar work, waiting tables, stacking shelves, tutoring, a paper round you've held for two years, all of it is evidence that you turn up and get things done.

Personal projects belong here as well. If you've built a website, run a small Etsy shop, coded something for the fun of it, edited videos that found an audience, or taught yourself a tool nobody asked you to learn, that's initiative on display, which is exactly what a first employer is scanning for. None of this is padding. It's the raw material of a strong first CV, and most people simply forget to include it.

Lead with education, not an empty history

On a normal CV, work experience sits near the top because it's the strongest evidence a reader has. Yours isn't there yet, so the order changes. For a first CV, lead with your education, because right now it's your main proof.

A sensible running order looks like this: contact details at the very top, then a short personal statement, then education, then experience (defined broadly, using everything from the section above), then skills. That's it. Nothing exotic.

The education section is where a first CV earns its keep, so give it room. Don't just list your course and grade and move straight on. Pull out the parts that matter to the role: relevant modules, your dissertation topic, a project with a concrete result. And write them as achievements, not as a syllabus. "Modules: Statistics, Research Methods" tells a reader nothing. "Built a regression model in R for my final project, analysing 5,000 survey responses" tells them you can actually do the work. Same course, completely different signal.

Keep the whole thing to one page. This isn't a limitation you're working around, it's the right length for where you are. A single, focused page reads as someone who knows what matters and leads with it. A second page almost always fills up with filler, and an experienced reader spots a padded graduate CV in seconds. If you're unsure where the line sits, our guide on how long a CV should be goes into it properly.

Open with a statement that points forward

On an experienced CV, the job title at the top does a lot of the framing: "Operations Manager" tells the reader who they're looking at before they've read a single line. You don't have that title yet, so the personal statement has to carry the weight instead. It's the one place you get to say who you are and where you're heading, in your own words, before the reader forms a view.

For a first CV, point the statement forward rather than back. You're not summarising a career, you're stating a direction and backing it with the best evidence you've got. Name your degree and grade if it's strong, one concrete thing you've done (a placement, a project, a relevant part-time role), and the kind of work you're after. Keep it to three or four lines and keep it specific. "Enthusiastic and hardworking graduate seeking an opportunity" could belong to anyone, which is exactly the problem. We break the structure down, with graduate examples, in our guide to writing a CV personal statement.

Show skills with evidence, not a list

The most common mistake on a first CV is a skills section that's really just a list of adjectives: teamwork, communication, problem-solving, Microsoft Office. It feels productive to write, and it persuades nobody. "Teamwork" on its own is a claim with nothing behind it, and a recruiter has read it a thousand times from a thousand candidates who all rated themselves highly.

The fix is the same one that runs through every good CV: attach each skill to a situation and an outcome. Don't say you have teamwork, show it. "Coordinated a team of six to run a charity quiz night for 40 attendees" is teamwork, organisation and initiative in a single line, and nobody has to take your word for it. "Communication" becomes "presented my final project to a room of thirty students and staff". "Problem-solving" becomes something you actually solved, described in a sentence.

Reach for numbers wherever you honestly can, and don't dismiss the small ones. This is early-career, so nobody expects seven-figure budgets. "Raised £300 for the society", "served 40 covers on a Friday shift", "grew the club's Instagram from 200 to 900 followers" all land, because a number is concrete and a number sticks in the memory. A modest figure you can stand behind beats a grand claim you can't, every single time.

The software still reads you first

One thing doesn't change just because it's your first CV: software usually reads it before a person does. Graduate schemes and large early-career employers are among the heaviest users of applicant tracking systems, precisely because they get thousands of applications for a handful of places. So the same discipline applies to you as to anyone with twenty years behind them.

Keep the format clean and machine-readable. Standard section headings (Education, Experience, Skills), a single column, a normal font, real bullet points, and nothing important hidden in a header, footer or graphic. The temptation with a thin CV is to reach for a fancy template to make the page look fuller. Resist it. A clever two-column design with icons and skill bars is more likely to confuse the parser than impress anyone, and it wins you nothing. Clean and standard beats decorated every time. Our guide to passing an ATS scan covers exactly what the software needs to see.

Your first-CV running order

You have far more to say than the empty work-history box suggests. Structure the page around the evidence you've already got, and a first CV stops being a problem to solve and starts being a fair account of what you can do.

Vettae is an AI-powered CV review tool that scores a CV for automated screening (ATS) and a human-recruiter read, then rewrites it grounded in the candidate's real experience.