How to Write a CV With No Experience (Graduate, Career Starter, Returner)
An empty CV is almost never an empty life. Here's how to build a credible one page from studies, side projects, part-time work and a career break.
The hardest CV to write is the first one. You open the template, you type your name, and then you hit a section called "Professional Experience" that you have nothing to put in. It feels like proof that you're not ready.
It isn't. An empty employment history is a formatting problem, not a worth problem — and the fix is to stop using a layout designed for someone with fifteen years of it. This guide covers the three people who face this: graduates and students, career starters coming from unrelated work, and people returning after a break.
First: change the order of the page
A standard CV leads with work history because, for most people, that's the strongest evidence. When it isn't yours, leading with it guarantees the reader's first impression is a gap. Move your strongest section up.
| Your situation | Order that works | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Recent graduate | Summary → Education → Projects → Experience → Skills | Your degree is recent, relevant and verifiable — lead with it |
| Career starter (unrelated jobs) | Summary → Skills → Experience → Education → Projects | Reframe real work experience around transferable skills |
| Returner after a break | Summary → Experience → Recent activity → Education → Skills | Your prior career is the asset; the break is one line, not the story |
| Self-taught / bootcamp | Summary → Projects → Skills → Education → Experience | Evidence you built things beats credentials you don't have |
Never leave a section empty
An empty "Professional Experience" heading draws the eye straight to the hole. If you have nothing for a section, delete the section. The reader will not notice its absence; they will absolutely notice its emptiness.
What counts as experience (more than you think)
Employers hiring at entry level are not expecting a decade of relevant work. They are looking for evidence that you show up, finish things, work with other people, and can be trusted with responsibility. That evidence has many sources.
Academic work
A dissertation, a group project, a lab, a capstone. Describe it like a job: what the goal was, what you owned, what came out of it. "Final-year project" is fine as a title.
Projects you made
An app, a shop, a newsletter, a modded server, a portfolio site, a research repo. Anything you built and can show. Link to it.
Part-time and seasonal work
Retail, hospitality, warehouse, tutoring, care work. This is real employment with real skills: cash handling, conflict de-escalation, working under load, hitting a standard while tired.
Volunteering and clubs
Treasurer of a society, organiser of an event, coach, committee member. Anything where other people relied on you having done something.
Certifications and courses
Completed ones with names and dates. A finished course beats a list of "currently learning".
Languages and mobility
Languages with honest levels, exchanges, relocations. In European markets especially, this is a genuine differentiator.
Nobody has "no experience". They have unlabelled experience — work that was real but was never written down in the vocabulary employers scan for.
If staring at a blank page is the blocker, start from a guided build instead: it asks you what you've done in plain questions and assembles the CV around your answers.
Start your first CV freeHow to write a bullet when you weren't paid for it
Use exactly the same formula a senior candidate uses: action + scope + outcome. The scale is smaller. The structure is identical, and that structure is most of what signals professionalism.
How people write it
- •"Worked part-time in a café."
- •"Did a group project at university."
- •"Helped out at a local charity."
- •"Learned Python."
How it should read
- •"Served 150+ covers per shift in a 6-person team; trained 3 new starters on till and opening procedures."
- •"Led a 4-person team on a semester-long market-analysis project; owned the data collection and presented findings to a panel of 3 lecturers (graded 1.3 / A)."
- •"Coordinated a monthly food distribution for ~80 households; rebuilt the volunteer rota, cutting no-shows by half."
- •"Built and published 3 Python projects, incl. a scraper handling 10k records/run (code on GitHub)."
Where to find your numbers
Covers per shift. Members in the society. Households served. Students tutored. Records processed. Followers gained. Grade achieved. Team size. Weeks the project ran. You have numbers — you've just never thought of them as achievements.
The summary: the three lines that do the most work
With a thin history, the summary at the top of your CV carries more weight than on any other kind of CV. It's your chance to state what you're aiming at and why you're a reasonable bet, before the reader starts counting years.
- 1Say what you are and what you want. "Business Administration graduate (BSc, 2026) targeting a junior controlling role."
- 2Give your strongest evidence. The internship, the project, the language, the tool. One thing, specifically.
- 3Say what you bring. Not adjectives — a fact. "Comfortable in Excel and SQL; bilingual FR/EN."
Adjective soup
"Motivated and hardworking recent graduate with excellent communication skills, seeking an opportunity to grow in a dynamic company."
Specific and checkable
"Business Administration graduate (BSc, 2026) targeting junior controlling. 6-month internship in FMCG finance; rebuilt the monthly reporting pack in Excel/Power Query. Bilingual FR/EN, working German."
If you're returning after a break
A career break — parental leave, caregiving, health, study, relocation, redundancy in a bad year — is common, and the modern norm is to name it in one line rather than leave a mysterious hole. What sinks returners isn't the gap; it's a CV that reads like it stopped in 2021.
- Add a dated entry titled "Career break" with a three-word reason. One line. No apology, no essay.
- Add a "Recent activity" or "Professional development" section: courses, freelance work, volunteering, committee roles from the break period.
- Rewrite your pre-break achievements in current vocabulary — tools and terminology move on even when your work didn't.
- Lead the summary with your prior seniority and what you're returning to, not with the break itself.
The tone to aim for
"Career break (caregiving), 2023–2025. Returning to operations management; completed Lean Six Sigma Green Belt in 2025." Factual, forward-facing, closed. Nobody reading that needs to ask a follow-up question.
The one-page rule, and when to break it
If you're early in your career, one page. Not because of a hard rule, but because a second page of thin material actively dilutes the first. The exception is academic or research applications, where publications and conferences belong on the record.
- Hobbies with no relevance and no detail ("reading, travelling, socialising")
- A photo of your school certificates
- "References available on request" — assumed, and a waste of a line
- Skill bar charts that claim you're 80% at communication
- Your full address — city and country is enough
The short version
- Reorder the page so your strongest section is first; delete empty sections rather than leaving them.
- Study, projects, part-time work, volunteering and languages are all experience — write them like jobs.
- Use action + scope + outcome even when nobody paid you.
- Make the summary specific and checkable, not a pile of adjectives.
- Name a career break in one factual line, then point forward.
You have more to put on the page than you think
A guided build walks you through studies, projects, part-time work and skills with plain questions, drafts the summary for you, and suggests the skills employers look for in your field. Free to build, right up to the finished document.
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Frequently asked questions
Should I include my part-time café or retail job on a professional CV?
Yes, especially early on. It demonstrates reliability, customer contact, working under pressure and often training or cash responsibility. Describe it with the same structure you'd use for a graduate role — team size, volume, what you were trusted with — and it reads as evidence rather than filler.
How do I write a CV if I've never had a job at all?
Lead with education, then a projects section, then skills. Treat your dissertation, coursework projects, society roles and anything you've built as your experience section — with dates, scope and outcomes. The structure is what signals professionalism; the scale of the content matters less than you'd expect at entry level.
Is it dishonest to call a university project 'experience'?
No, as long as you label it accurately. Put it under a section called "Projects" or "Academic Projects" rather than "Professional Experience", and describe your actual role in it. Recruiters hiring graduates expect and want this — what they object to is a project dressed up to look like paid employment.
How do I explain a two-year gap on my CV?
One dated line with a plain reason: "Career break — caregiving, 2023–2025". Then show one or two things you did during or since (a course, freelance work, volunteering). Explanation plus forward motion closes the question. Silence invites the reader to invent a worse story than the real one.
One page or two for a first CV?
One. A second page of thin content makes the first page look weaker by association. Once you have three to five years of relevant experience, two pages becomes normal in most European markets — and in academic or research applications, publication lists justify more from the start.