“No experience” almost never means no experience. It means no full-time job with a title that sounds impressive. A 19-year-old who has tutored maths for two summers, organised a school fundraiser and built a website for their uncle’s shop has plenty to put on a page. The trick is to stop thinking in job titles and start thinking in evidence.
Employers hiring for entry-level roles know you haven’t had a career yet. What they want to see is that you are reliable, can learn, and have done something with your time. Your resume should prove those three things.
Use this structure
When work history is thin, change the order so the strongest material comes first:
- Header with name, the job you’re applying for, phone, email, city
- Profile summary (two or three sentences)
- Education
- Experience: projects, volunteering, part-time jobs, internships
- Skills
- Languages and certificates
Keep it to one page. A first resume that runs to two pages looks padded, and it usually is.
Education does more work than you think
For a student or recent graduate, education is the main qualification, so give it more than one line. Add relevant courses, a final project or thesis title, a strong grade, awards or scholarships, an Erasmus semester. Leave out a weak grade rather than drawing attention to it.
Example:
BSc Business Administration, West University of Timișoara, 2023–2026
Relevant courses: Marketing, Financial Accounting, Business Statistics
Final project: Customer retention analysis for a local coffee chain (grade 9.5/10)
Erasmus semester, University of Valencia, spring 2025
That tells a recruiter far more than “Bachelor’s degree, 2026”.
Things that count as experience
Call the section “Experience” rather than “Work experience”, and include anything where you had responsibility and did real work. Some options people forget:
Part-time and seasonal jobs count, even if they’re unrelated to what you want now. Waiting tables shows you can handle pressure, deal with customers and show up on time on a Saturday. Babysitting, tutoring, delivering food, working the till at a festival: all fine.
Volunteering. Treat it exactly like a job, with an organisation, dates and bullet points.
School and university projects, especially group projects with a result you can describe. “Led a team of 4 to build a budgeting app in Flutter; presented to a jury of 3 local employers” is a perfectly good entry.
Clubs and societies where you held a role: treasurer, event organiser, team captain, editor of the student newspaper.
Personal projects. A blog with real readers, a YouTube channel, an Etsy shop, a GitHub profile, a podcast. These show initiative, which employers value in junior hires more than almost anything else.
Internships, obviously, even short or unpaid ones.
For each entry, write two to four bullet points about what you did and what came out of it. Use numbers wherever you can. “Served up to 80 customers per shift” is better than “Served customers”.
Skills: be specific and honest
Junior resumes often list “communication, teamwork, problem solving” and nothing else. Every other applicant wrote the same words. Lead with concrete skills instead (our skills list by job has more ideas): Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP), Canva, basic HTML and CSS, Google Analytics, a driving licence, a forklift certificate, typing speed. Then add two soft skills you can back up somewhere else on the page.
Don’t exaggerate. If you write “fluent German” and the interviewer switches to German, you’ll want to have told the truth.
Write the profile summary last
Your summary should say what you’re studying or have just finished, what you’re good at, and what kind of role you want. Two or three sentences. Here’s one for a marketing graduate:
Business graduate with hands-on experience running social media for a student organisation of 300 members, where engagement grew 4x in one year. Comfortable with Canva, Meta Business Suite and Google Analytics. Looking for a junior marketing role in a consumer brand.
Compare that with “Motivated graduate seeking an opportunity to grow.” The first one gets read. The second gets skipped.
Full example: school leaver applying for a retail job
Andrei Marin
Sales Assistant · andrei.marin@email.com · +40 7xx xxx xxx · Cluj-NapocaProfile
Friendly and reliable school leaver with weekend experience in a busy café and two years volunteering at a food bank. Comfortable handling cash and talking to customers. Available full time, including weekends.Education
Baccalaureate, Emil Racoviță National College, Cluj-Napoca, 2026. Grade 9.1.Experience
Weekend Barista, Café Lumen, Cluj-Napoca, 06/2024 – present
• Prepare drinks and serve up to 120 customers per Saturday shift
• Handle cash and card payments; till always balanced at close
• Trained two new weekend staff membersVolunteer, Cluj Food Bank, 09/2023 – present
• Sort and pack donations for around 200 families a month
• Helped organise a school collection that raised 1.4 tonnes of foodSkills
Customer service · Cash handling · POS systems · Microsoft Excel · TeamworkLanguages
Romanian (native) · English (B2) · French (A2)
Nothing on that page is impressive on its own. Together it says: shows up, handles money, deals with people, takes initiative. That’s exactly what a store manager wants.
Things to leave out
Primary or middle school, once you have a secondary school diploma. A photo, unless you’re applying in a country where it’s expected (see our guide on photos on CVs). Hobbies that say nothing (“watching films, going out with friends”). “References available on request”, which employers assume anyway. And any sentence starting with “Although I have no experience…”. Don’t apologise. Show what you have.
Next step
Our builder makes the reordering easy: drag Education above Experience, and rename sections as you like. The pre-written phrases include entry-level wording for retail, hospitality and customer service, and the resume score tells you what is still missing. Start from a template, or read our step-by-step guide first.
