How to write a CV with no work experience
Everyone starts with no work experience. Employers hiring for a first job aren’t looking for a long career history. They want evidence that you’re reliable, can learn quickly and can get on with people. You can show all three without a single paid job.
What to put first
If you have no relevant work experience, change the order of your CV:
- Contact details
- Short profile: two sentences on who you are and what kind of role you’re looking for.
- Education: your course, college or school, and the year you finish or finished.
- Experience: volunteering, part-time work, projects, sports or clubs.
- Skills
- Certifications, for example first aid, Safe Pass, manual handling, or a language or IT course.
One page is plenty.
Experience counts even when it wasn’t a job
All of these show skills an employer wants:
- Volunteering: charity shops, coaching a youth team, helping at events.
- Part-time or casual work: babysitting, retail, hospitality, deliveries, family business.
- School and college: class representative, projects, competitions, school work-experience placements, a final-year project.
- Clubs and sport: team captain, organising fixtures, fundraising.
Write them the same way you’d write a job: a title, the organisation, dates, and one or two achievements. “Coached an under-10s football team of 15 players every Saturday for two seasons” shows commitment, communication and responsibility.
Education that sells you
- Include your course, the college, and your expected or achieved result.
- Add two or three relevant modules or projects: “Final-year project: built a booking app used by 30 classmates”.
- For school leavers, include your final school results (for example A-levels, the Leaving Certificate, a high school diploma or the IB) or the subjects relevant to the job.
Transferable skills, with proof
Don’t just list “teamwork” or “hard-working”. Show them:
- Reliability: “Worked every Saturday for two years without missing a shift.”
- Customer service: “Served 100+ customers a day during the Christmas rush.”
- Organisation: “Organised a charity quiz that raised €1,200.”
Common first-CV mistakes
- Leaving off part-time and casual jobs because they “don’t count”. They do.
- Long lists of soft skills with no examples.
- An unprofessional email address. Make a simple one with your name.
- Spelling mistakes. Ask someone to read it before you send it.
Start from an example
The CV builder gives you a clean, one-page layout that applicant tracking systems can read. For jobs like retail, hospitality, warehouse and care work, open the matching page in our CV examples for skills and wording you can adapt.
Build an ATS-friendly CV
Start from an example for your job, then download a clean PDF or Word file. Free, no sign-up.
Open the CV builder