A resume with no experience: what to put on the page

The first resume is the hardest to write because the conventional structure assumes experience you do not have yet. The fix is not to inflate what you have done — it is to reorganise the page so the evidence you do have appears first.

Reordered sections for a first resume

• Name and contact details.
• Summary or personal statement — degree, result, and one concrete thing you did.
• Education — with modules, dissertation or project if relevant to the role.
• Projects — coursework, personal, society or volunteer projects, treated exactly like jobs.
• Work history — part-time, seasonal and gig work, with the transferable behaviour made explicit.
• Skills — tools and languages you can actually use, honestly levelled.

Courses and projects count when framed properly

A dissertation is a project with a scope, a method, an output and usually a result. Write it the way you would write a job: what you did, with what tools, at what scale, and what came out of it.

Before: Dissertation on regional wage inequality. After: Built a 12-year regional wage dataset from published statistics and analysed it in Python and Stata; found the gap widened fastest in mid-sized cities, which became the paper's main argument.

Part-time work is not filler

Retail, hospitality and delivery work demonstrate reliability, customer handling, conflict resolution and often cash responsibility. The mistake is listing the job title with no evidence of behaviour. One well-written bullet beats three duties.

• Handled up to 90 customer transactions a shift and resolved complaints without escalating to a manager in the large majority of cases.
• Trained four new starters on till and closing procedures over one summer.
• Managed stock rotation for a chilled section with daily waste targets; kept waste below the store average.

Create the experience you are missing

If the gap is technical, a portfolio project closes it faster than any wording. Choose something small and finish it: a working analysis with a written summary, a small site, a documented process improvement for a charity. Publish it somewhere linkable and put the link in the resume.

This is also the honest answer to the no-experience problem — you cannot rewrite your way into experience, but you can add some in a fortnight.

What to leave off

• School grades once you have a degree, unless they are exceptional and requested.
• References available on request.
• A photo (UK and US), date of birth, marital status, nationality.
• Skill ratings you cannot justify — Python 4/5 invites a question you may not want.
• Hobbies that are only there to fill the page. One line, only if it is genuinely relevant or interesting.

The test at the end

Read the advert's requirements, then your resume. For each requirement, can you point to a line that shows it? If three or more requirements have no corresponding evidence, the resume is not ready — either add the evidence honestly, or apply somewhere the match is better.