How to write a resume with no experience

The standard advice for a first resume is "highlight transferable skills", which is useless because it does not tell you what to write. Here is the concrete version.

The problem is specificity, not experience

Two people with identical backgrounds:

Dissertation — Wrote a dissertation on urban transport policy.

Dissertation — Analysed 12 years of bus punctuality data across 4 UK cities. Found that timetable padding accounted for around 60% of reported reliability improvement. Presented findings to the department; cited in a follow-up study.

Same work. The first is a fact about your degree. The second is a piece of research with a method, a scope, a finding and an outcome — and it reads like professional work, because it is.

Almost every weak first resume is the first version of everything. You are not short of material; you are describing it in a way that cannot be assessed.

Section order

1. Education — while it is your strongest asset
2. Projects — academic, personal, competition, freelance
3. Relevant coursework — named modules, with grades if strong
4. Internships or placements — however short
5. Volunteering and activities — with responsibility described
6. Skills — grouped, honest
7. Other employment — retail, hospitality, warehouse. One line each, at the bottom

That last one gets debated. Keep it. A summer in a supermarket says you have held a job, turned up on time and dealt with the public. Recruiters do read that. It just is not a headline, so give it one line and no bullets.

Turning coursework into projects

A project section is the single biggest upgrade available to a first resume, and most people leave it out because they think a coursework assignment does not count.

It counts if you describe it like work: what it was, what you did, what came out.

Retail demand forecasting model — Python, pandas, scikit-learn Built a weekly demand forecast for a 40-store dataset as a final-year project. Reduced mean absolute error 23% against the naive baseline by adding holiday and weather features. Wrote up the method for a group of 30 in the department seminar.

Three lines, and it demonstrates tooling, a measurable result and communication.

What qualifies as a project:

• Your dissertation or final-year project
• A group assignment where you built something
• A hackathon or case competition entry, including ones you did not win
• A society you ran, an event you organised
• Anything you built for yourself — a site, a bot, a game, a zine, a shop
• Freelance or family-business work, however small

Getting numbers into a first resume

Numbers are what turn "was involved in" into evidence. You have them:

• Study — cohort rank, grade average, module marks, dataset size, sample size
• Societies — members before and after, events run, attendance, money raised
• Retail and hospitality — covers per shift, till accuracy, people trained, shifts scheduled
• Sport and volunteering — team size, sessions run, participants, hours
• Anything online — readers, downloads, subscribers, contributions merged

Treasurer, Economics Society — Grew membership from 42 to 118 in one year by moving events to a paid-speaker format. Managed a GBP 6k budget with a GBP 300 surplus at handover.

That is a first resume line that a recruiter can actually use.

The summary, if you use one

Most first resumes should have one, because your job titles do not exist yet to do the positioning for you. Three lines, and it must say something only you could write.

Not this:

Motivated and hardworking recent graduate seeking a challenging role in a dynamic organisation where I can develop my skills.

This:

Economics graduate (2:1, Manchester) focused on applied data work — dissertation used 12 years of transport data to test a policy claim. Comfortable in Python and SQL, and looking for an analyst role where the output is a decision rather than a dashboard.

The second one has a field, evidence, tools and a preference. Worked examples in professional summary examples.

Grades

Include your average if it is strong — around 3.5 out of 4, or a UK 2:1 and above. Leave it off otherwise, and nobody will ask.

Often more persuasive than an average:

• A cohort rank: "top 5% of 240"
• A single relevant module mark: "Econometrics 82%"
• A prize or scholarship, with what it was for

Skills without lying

The temptation is to list everything you have ever opened. Do not, because everything listed is an interview question.

Group them and be honest about level:

Technical     Python (pandas, scikit-learn), SQL, Excel, Git
Analysis      Regression, A/B testing, survey design
Languages     English (native), Spanish (B2)

Leave out Microsoft Word. It reads as filler and makes the rest look padded.

What to cut

• "References available on request." Everyone knows. It wastes a line.
• Secondary school results, once you have a degree.
• An objective statement about seeking a challenging opportunity.
• Hobbies with no relevance. "Reading, music, socialising" is worse than the whitespace.
• A personal logo. On a first resume it reads as a student exercise.
• Anything you cannot discuss for two minutes in an interview.

One page

One page. Not because of a rule, but because two pages of undergraduate material means padding, and padding is visible immediately.

If you are over, cut the retail bullets before you cut a project, and cut a project before you cut your dissertation. Do not shrink the font below about 10pt — it reads as trying to hide the length rather than solving it.

Templates that suit this

Graduate puts education first with a formal double-rule header. Student is friendlier — rounded cards, colour-coded sections — and makes coursework and activities look substantial. Both are in the academic collection.

For graduate schemes, which are usually automated and very high volume, use Chronological or ATS Friendly from the ATS collection instead.

And apply early

Graduate schemes especially. Recruiters work through a list and stop when they have enough people to interview. Being in the first week beats being in the third by more than any wording change you can make.