You have more to show than you think
“Experience” on a resume does not have to mean a paid job. Before you write anything, take ten minutes to list everything you have done in the past few years, then pick what is closest to the job you want.
- Courses and final projects, especially those with something you made, measured or presented.
- Personal projects: an app, a website, a video channel, a small online shop or a side business.
- Volunteering: at a charity, a student union, a local club or a community event.
- Part-time and seasonal work: retail, hospitality, tutoring, babysitting, delivery.
- Competitions and certificates: hackathons, olympiads, language exams, online courses that ended with real work.
- Responsibility at home or in a group: captain of a team, treasurer of a society, organizer of a trip.
Use a layout that leads with your strengths
Standard resumes put work history first because that is where experienced people are strongest. You can change the order so that a reader sees your strengths first, while keeping the familiar headings that people and software expect.
- Name and contact line: email, phone, city and a link to your portfolio or LinkedIn, if you have one.
- Summary: two sentences on what you study or do, and the job you want.
- Education: degree or diploma, school, dates and relevant courses.
- Projects: two or three, written like jobs.
- Experience: part-time work and volunteering, most recent first.
- Skills: tools, languages and methods, without adjectives.
Write projects as if they were jobs
A project is experience if you write it that way. Give it a name, say what it was for and what you used, then describe a result. The same bullet formula works here as in any job: a verb, what you did and what came of it.
Before
Made a website for a club as a project at university.
After
Built a booking website for a university club in React, with online payments. Used by 120 members in its first semester, replacing a shared spreadsheet.
Before
Worked in a café.
After
Served up to 80 customers per shift at a busy café and trained three new staff on the till and food safety rules.
Numbers help a lot and they do not have to be large: the size of a team, how many people used something, how many customers you served. Starting each line with one of these action verbs makes this much easier.
List skills an employer can check
Read two or three job postings for the role you want and note the skills that appear in all of them. Those are the ones to list first, as long as you can honestly use them. Name specific tools rather than general talents.
Before
Fast learner, hard worker, good with computers, team player
After
Excel (pivot tables, lookups), Google Analytics, Canva, English (C1), German (B1)
Soft skills do count, but they convince only when they are shown in your projects and jobs rather than listed. Our guide to resume skills has examples by type of work.
A full example
This is what the whole page can look like for someone applying for a first marketing job. The person and the details are invented, so take the structure and use your own facts.
Alex Morgan alex.morgan@example.com · +1 555 010 2030 · Lakeview SUMMARY Marketing student with hands-on experience in social media and event promotion. Looking for a first role as a marketing assistant. EDUCATION BA Marketing, Lakeview University, expected May 2027 Relevant courses: Digital Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Statistics PROJECTS Campus Food Bank campaign (team of 4) Planned and ran an Instagram campaign that raised donations by 40% over one semester. Study Buddy launch (course project) Wrote the launch plan and survey for a student app, collecting 210 responses and presenting the results to a panel of local founders. EXPERIENCE Sales Assistant, Lakeside Books, 2024 to present (part-time) Serve up to 60 customers a shift and created the store’s newsletter, now sent to 800 subscribers. Volunteer, Lakeview Film Festival, 2025 Ran ticketing with a team of five for over 500 guests across three evenings. SKILLS Meta Business Suite, Google Analytics, Canva, Excel English (native), Spanish (B2)
What to leave out
- “No experience” statements. Do not apologize for what you lack, on the resume or in the letter.
- An objective about your dreams. Say what you can bring to the job, not what you hope to get from it.
- School achievements from long ago, unless you are still in school or they are remarkable.
- Hobbies with no link to the job. Keep the ones that show a skill, such as a club you run or a team you captain.
- Anything invented. It is easy to check and hard to explain in an interview.
Once your page is ready, make a small change for each application. A ten-minute tailoring routine matters even more when you do not have experience to speak for you. If a cover letter is requested, our examples include one for a first job.
