A blank work-history section feels like a dead end. It isn’t. Recruiters hiring for entry-level and internship roles do not expect a decade of jobs, they expect evidence that you can learn, ship, and show up. That evidence is already in your life, it is just filed under the wrong headings.
Lead with projects, not a summary of nothing
The strongest no-experience CVs put a Projects or Coursework section right under the header, where a work-history section would normally sit. A class assignment you took further, a side hustle, a volunteer app, a club you ran, each of these is a bullet that proves initiative. Describe them the way you would a job: what you did, what tool you used, what changed because of it.
Turn effort into outcomes
“Helped organise the campus career fair” is a task. “Coordinated 12 employers and 300 students for the campus career fair, up 40% on the year before” is an outcome. You do not need corporate metrics, you need honest numbers: headcounts, hours saved, money raised, grades, downloads.
- Coursework that maps to the job, named specifically.
- Projects and side work, with the result stated in plain numbers.
- Transferable skills from part-time work, sports, or family responsibility.
Format so a scanner can read it
Entry-level CVs get filtered by the same ATS as senior ones. Keep it single-column, keep the section headings standard, and skip the photo and the graphics. A clean layout beats a designed one every time at this stage.
When you’re ready, our CV guide walks the full structure, the bullet point writer turns “I built a thing” into a line a recruiter will read, and the resume builder puts projects at the top automatically. If you’re a student, the student page has templates built for exactly this.