General
Templates for anyone starting out — students, fresh graduates, and career changers with no prior experience.
CV Example With No Experience
Having no work experience isn't the problem — an empty CV is. The fix is to reorder it: put education, skills, training and activities up front instead of leaving an experience section blank. Employers advertising entry-level roles already know you don't have five years behind you; what they're looking for is evidence that you learn quickly and follow through.
- recent graduate
- cooperative training
- graduation project
- teamwork
Student CV Example
A student CV exists to land an internship or part-time work, not a senior post. So it stays on one page and concentrates on what you're studying now, what you've achieved inside the university, and the skills that make you useful from week one. Include your GPA if it's strong; leave it out if it isn't.
- university student
- summer internship
- part-time work
- coursework projects
Fresh Graduate CV Example
Fresh graduates are in a stronger position than they think: current knowledge, recently-learned tools, and plenty of employers who would rather train someone new than retrain someone set in their ways. What matters is that the CV shows a clear move from study into work — a specific field, concrete projects, and one stated goal rather than vague phrasing.
- recent graduate
- cooperative placement
- graduation project
- data analysis
Nobody is rejected for having no experience — they are rejected for an empty page. And the two are not the same: a cooperative placement, a graduation project, part-time work and student activities are all experience, but they have to be written the way work is written, not the way coursework is.
Fill the page with what you actually have
The empty page is the problem, not the absence of experience. Four things nearly every graduate has and leaves out: the cooperative placement, the graduation project, part-time or volunteer work, and free certificates.
Write the placement as a full job, with the organisation, the dates and three achievement bullets. Giving it one line wastes the strongest thing in your CV.
- Cooperative training or Tamheer — under Experience, not under Training
- Graduation project — by problem, tools and result, not by title
- Part-time and volunteer work — reliability and public-facing pressure
- Free certificates from Google, Microsoft and Coursera
Invert the "career objective"
Most graduate CVs open with a paragraph about what the writer wants: "seeking a challenging environment to develop my skills". That is a sentence about your needs, and you are not the reader.
Replace it with a summary of what you offer: your field, the strongest thing you have done, and the tools you can use. Three sentences is enough, and it is the most-read part of the page.
GPA, and the one page
Include your GPA when it is strong and drop it when it is not. A fresh graduate genuinely is assessed on it, because it is the clearest thing they have — but an average figure at the top pulls attention away from your projects.
And one page, no more. A three-page CV from someone with no experience reads as an inability to tell what matters from what does not, which is a worse impression than inexperience itself.
Common questions
- What do I put on a CV with no work experience?
- Cooperative training, your graduation project, part-time and volunteer work, student activities and free certificates. All of it is experience if written as achievement: what the task was, what you did, and what came of it.
- Should I include my GPA?
- Include it if it is strong; otherwise give the space to your projects. Nobody asks about a GPA that is not there, but a weak one printed at the top is read before anything else.
- How long should a graduate CV be?
- One page. The only exception is a graduate with two or three placements and real projects — and even that usually fits on one page with better ordering.