What this page is. A method for building a first CV when you have never had a job, written by people who take no commission from any university, employer or recruiter. Nothing here is a template you pay for. See how we research.
The problem, stated properly
A CV is not a list of jobs. It is an argument that you can be trusted with a task. Employment history is the most convenient evidence for that argument, which is why everyone uses it, but it is not the only evidence and it was never the point. If you have no employment history, you are not missing the evidence. You are missing the most convenient form of it.
So the whole job of a first CV is to find the evidence you do have and present it in the shape a reader can use.
The structure that works when you have no jobs
Reverse the conventional order. Put what you have most of at the top.
- Name and contact. Name, city and country, one email, one phone number with the country code, one professional profile link if you have one. No photograph unless the country you are applying in expects one, and no date of birth.
- One-line summary. What you are, what you are looking for, one relevant capability. Three lines maximum, and no adjectives about yourself.
- Education. Institution, qualification, dates, and then the part most students leave out: the two or three modules, projects or dissertations that are actually relevant, each with a one-line description of what you produced.
- Projects. The section that replaces employment. Anything you built, ran, organised or analysed, whether or not anyone paid you.
- Skills. Named tools and languages, with a level you would be willing to be tested on. Nothing else.
- Activities and responsibility. Societies, volunteering, sport, family responsibility, tutoring, anything where somebody depended on you turning up.
- Languages and certificates. With the test, the score and the year where one exists.
What counts as experience when nobody has employed you
All of the following are evidence, and all of them belong on a first CV if they are relevant:
- A coursework project with a deliverable somebody else read or used.
- A dissertation or final-year project, described by what it produced rather than by its title.
- Unpaid work for a family business, which is work whether or not it was paid.
- Running a society, a team, a fundraiser, an event, a club account.
- Tutoring, coaching, translating, or teaching anyone anything.
- Open-source contributions, published writing, a maintained dataset, a public repository.
- Competitions, hackathons, olympiads, case competitions, including the ones you did not win.
- Care responsibilities that required scheduling, budgeting or advocacy, described in neutral professional terms if you are comfortable including them.
What does not count: courses you watched, certificates issued for attendance, and skills you have not used on anything.
Bullet points: the one pattern
Every bullet should be verb, object, method, result. Four elements, one line, past tense.
- Weak: “Responsible for the society’s social media.”
- Better: “Ran the society’s social media account.”
- Strong: “Ran the society’s social media account, moving from ad-hoc posting to a weekly schedule, which took attendance at events from about a dozen to a full room.”
Notice that the strong version contains a number that is honest and approximate, described as approximate. Invented precision is the single fastest way to lose a reader who checks. If you do not know the number, say what changed instead.
What gets a student CV rejected
- Two pages of nothing. One page, dense, is stronger than two pages padded. Length is not effort.
- Skill bars and star ratings. They encode nothing. “Python, 4 stars” is not a claim anyone can act on. Name what you built with it.
- A photograph, a date of birth, a marital status in a country whose employers are legally uncomfortable receiving them. Norms differ by country. Check the norm where you are applying rather than where you are from.
- Unexplained gaps in the education section. A single neutral line closes a gap. Silence invites the reader to invent something worse.
- A file named “CV final v3 (2).docx”. Send a PDF named with your own name, unless a specific format was requested.
- Claims that contradict the rest of the application. Readers cross-check. Your CV, your statement of purpose and your references have to describe the same person.
Do you still need a cover letter?
If one is requested, yes, and it should not repeat the CV. The CV says what you did. The letter says why this position, and it answers the one question the CV cannot: what you would do in the first month. If no letter is requested, do not send one unsolicited unless the culture you are applying into expects it.
Printable first-CV builder
Print this, fill it in by hand, then type it up. Handwriting first stops you from formatting instead of thinking.
What we could not source
- An authoritative CV length rule. No standards body publishes one. The one-page recommendation on this page is our judgement for a first CV, labelled as such.
- Screening-software pass rates. The widely repeated statistics about applicant tracking systems rejecting a given percentage of CVs trace back to vendor marketing, not to published research. There are none on this page.
- Country-by-country legal rules on photographs and personal data on CVs. These follow national equality and data-protection law and are not collected in one authoritative place. We tell you to check the norm where you are applying rather than give you a table we cannot stand behind.
FAQ
CV or resume, what is the difference?
In most of Europe and the Commonwealth, a CV is the ordinary one-page or two-page application document. In the United States, a resume is that document and a CV usually means the long, complete academic record used for research and teaching posts. Use the word the advertisement uses.
Should I use a template?
Use a plain one. Anything with columns, text boxes or graphics risks being reordered or dropped when the file is parsed. Nothing on this site is sold, and you do not need to buy a template.
How do I get the first piece of experience?
Produce something with a deliverable and a deadline that somebody other than you can see. A dataset, a report, an event, a repository. The first line of a first CV is almost always something the applicant made rather than something they were given.
Next steps
- How to write a statement of purpose
- How to ask for recommendation letters
- The application document checklist
- The application timeline
- The no-agent roadmap
- How scholarships actually get won
- A practical guide to fully funded scholarships
- Arriving abroad: the first 30 days
- The study abroad glossary
- How we research these pages
