Knowing what to put on a CV with no experience is harder than filling one that has ten years of jobs behind it. The page is the same size, but the obvious material — job titles, employers, dates — simply is not there.
The fix is not to pad the page with adjectives. It is to know what belongs in each section when there is no employment history to fill it, and which sections move up the page as a result. This guide goes block by block, with the wording to use in each one.
What to Put on a CV With No Experience, Section by Section
A first CV uses the same building blocks as any other. What changes is the order and what fills them. Education stops being a footnote and becomes your main evidence; the experience section stays, but it stops meaning paid employment.
The order below is the one to follow when you have no work history. It is also what the UK National Careers Service recommends: education can sit straight after your introduction if you are early in your career or do not have much work history.
- 1
Contact details
Name, phone, professional email, city and LinkedIn. No full address, no date of birth.
Top of page one
- 2
Personal statement
Three or four lines naming your field, your strongest piece of evidence and the role you want.
3-4 lines
- 3
Education
Qualification, plus the modules, project titles and dissertation that match the job.
Moves up when you are early in your career
- 4
Experience and achievements
Volunteering, placements, committee roles, freelance work and personal projects, most recent first.
Renamed, not deleted
- 5
Skills
Six to eight skills, each carrying one line of evidence.
Evidence, not adjectives
- 6
Courses and certifications
Finished online courses, licences, language levels, safety training.
Optional but useful
- 7
Interests
Three or four activities that show a quality the job actually needs.
Last, and short
Two sections do not belong on a first CV: a references block (write available on request or nothing at all) and an objective statement that only says what you want. Both burn space you need elsewhere.
Contact details: the one section that is identical for everyone
Put your full name, a phone number, a professional email address, your city and region, and a LinkedIn URL if the profile is complete. Leave out your full street address, your date of birth and your marital status — none of them help, and in most countries employers are not supposed to ask.
Country conventions do vary. If you are applying inside the EU, the standard structure is the Europass one, and our guide to the Europass CV in Word shows which fields are expected and which are optional.
What to Write in Your Personal Statement
Your personal statement is three or four lines at the top of the CV, and it is the section most first-time writers get wrong. It should name your field, your best evidence and the role you are applying for — in that order, in about 50 words.
The failure mode is always the same: adjectives with nothing behind them. Hard-working, motivated and team player appear on almost every entry-level CV, which is precisely why they carry no information. Swap each one for the fact that made you believe it.
Never open with an apology. Phrases beginning although I have no experience tell the reader to lower their expectations before they have read a single fact about you.
Write a new statement for each application and reuse the vocabulary of the advert. If the posting asks for stakeholder communication, use that phrase rather than good with people.
Education: What to Put Beyond Your Degree Title
With no work history, education is your longest section — so it needs more than a degree title and a date. List the modules, project titles and dissertation that connect to the job, because those are the closest thing you have to relevant professional work.
What to include, in order of usefulness:
- Qualification, institution and dates — most recent first.
- Three to five relevant modules, chosen per application rather than listed in full.
- Your dissertation or final project title, with one line on what it found.
- Group projects where you can name your own contribution.
- Grades, but only if they help: a 2:1 or above in the UK, roughly 3.5/4.0 elsewhere.
- Prizes, scholarships and academic awards, with the year.
Attach evidence wherever you can. Newcastle University's careers guidance makes the point bluntly: recruiters scan quickly, so lead with the most relevant information and back achievements with a figure — if you fundraised for a society, say how much you raised.
If your grades are weak, do not lie and do not draw attention to them. Give the qualification and the institution, skip the number, and let the modules and projects carry the section.
What Counts as Experience If You've Never Had a Job?
Almost everyone with no formal work experience has more material than they think. The trick is renaming the section: the University of York advises calling it Experience and achievements instead of Employment history, so volunteering and positions of responsibility belong there by definition.
Anything with a start date, a responsibility and an outcome qualifies. Here is what usually gets left off a first CV by mistake, and where it should go:
| What you did | What it proves | How to write the line |
|---|---|---|
| Volunteering | Reliability, teamwork, initiative | Coordinated a monthly food bank collection with six volunteers, raising 1,200 kg of donations in a year |
| Casual or weekend work | Customer service, working under pressure | Served 200+ customers per shift in a 12-seat cafe, handling cash and stock counts unsupervised |
| Society or club role | Leadership, budgeting, organisation | Ran the treasury of a 400-member society, managing a 3,000 EUR annual budget across 14 events |
| Personal or academic projects | Technical skill, self-direction | Built and published a recipe blog that reached 1,000 monthly readers within eight months |
| Family business help | Admin, bookkeeping, scheduling | Handled supplier invoicing and weekly rotas for a family restaurant during two summer seasons |
| Freelance or gig work | Client management, delivery | Delivered 15 logo commissions for local businesses via Fiverr, all rated 5 stars |
Write each entry the same way you would a job: role, organisation, dates, then two or three bullets. Every bullet needs a verb at the front and a result at the end. Our guide to writing CV bullet points shows the pattern applied to dozens of real lines.
The hard part is naming the ability behind each of those entries instead of the activity itself. How to identify your job skills walks through the inventory that turns any of them into a skill with a proof beside it.
That same inventory is what the interview runs on. The interview questions for candidates with no experience draw on exactly these entries, so naming the ability once here saves you improvising it under pressure later.
Skills, Courses and Interests: What Fills the Rest of the Page
Skills: name it, then prove it
A skills list with no evidence is decoration. Six to eight skills is plenty, and each one should carry a short proof in brackets or on the same line, so the reader never has to take your word for it.
- Public speaking — presented final-year research to an audience of 60.
- Excel — built the budget tracker used by a 400-member society.
- Spanish — C1, six months studying in Valencia.
- Customer service — two summers on a busy retail floor with no escalations.
Split hard skills (software, languages, certifications, techniques) from soft ones, and keep the soft list short — they are the hardest to prove and the easiest to doubt. Choosing the right verb matters more than you would expect here, which is why a list of action words for your CV is worth keeping open while you write.
If the hard part is working out which skills you even have, the companion guide to choosing and proving skills on a CV with no experience runs the inventory in five steps.
Courses and certifications
Include anything finished, with the provider and the year: Google Career Certificates, Coursera or edX courses, language qualifications, driving licences, first aid or food safety training. Half-finished courses do not count — leave them off until the certificate exists.
Where that block sits on the page, and the five fields every entry needs, depends on the offer you are answering: the guide on how to list certifications on a CV works through the placement rules case by case.
Interests
Three or four lines, and each one should do a job. Reading and socialising say nothing; captain of a five-a-side team for three seasons shows commitment and organisation. If an interest cannot be tied to a quality the role needs, cut it and use the space elsewhere.
What Should You Leave Off a CV With No Experience?
Anything that draws attention to the gap. No apologies, no explanation of why you have not worked yet, no objective statement about what you hope to gain. The reader already knows this is a first CV — the date on your qualification tells them.
That advice inverts the moment you have a work history behind you. A blank stretch between two dated entries does have to be accounted for, and our guide to explaining gaps in your CV gives the wording for each reason.
Also leave off: a photo unless the country expects one, your date of birth, your full address, your school grades once you hold a degree, a references block, and skill rating bars that claim 90% Excel without saying what you built with it.
Keep the whole thing to one page while you are starting out. Newcastle's guidance caps a CV at two pages for everyone; with no employment history, one well-filled page reads far better than two padded ones.
Once every section is filled and the padding is gone, the remaining work is tailoring — rewriting the statement, reordering the modules and swapping the skills for each individual advert. Building that first version from a structured template rather than a blank document makes the tailoring far quicker, which is what our AI CV builder is designed to do: it holds the section order above and lets you produce a new tailored version per application in a couple of minutes.
Then write the letter that goes with it. The same evidence problem shows up there, and our guide to writing a cover letter with no experience covers the structure and the opening lines to use.
With the CV and the letter ready, the last piece is the search itself: the channels, the LinkedIn profile and the weekly rhythm that get them read. Our guide on how to search for a first job with no experience covers that side.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do you put on a CV if you have never worked?
You put education, volunteering, positions of responsibility, personal or academic projects, courses and skills — each with a concrete result attached. Rename the section Experience and achievements so unpaid work belongs there naturally, and move education above it.
How long should a CV with no experience be?
One page. Two pages is the general maximum for any CV, but without an employment history there is rarely enough substantial material to fill a second page honestly. A single dense page always beats two padded ones.
What skills should I put on a CV with no experience?
Six to eight, split between hard skills you can name (software, languages, certifications) and soft skills you can prove with one example each. Take the wording from the job advert wherever it genuinely applies to you.
Should I include hobbies on a CV with no experience?
Yes, but only three or four, and only ones that demonstrate a quality the role needs. Team sports, running a club, a technical side project or a language you are learning all work. Generic entries like music or travelling waste space.
Does volunteering count as work experience on a CV?
Yes. Volunteering has a start date, responsibilities and outcomes, which is everything an employer looks for in an experience entry. Write it exactly as you would a paid role, including hours per week and what changed because you were there.
Should I say on my CV that I have no experience?
No, never. Stating it explicitly frames your entire application around a weakness that the reader would have inferred anyway. Fill each section with what you do have and let the evidence speak.