How to Make a Resume With No Experience in 2024 [+ Examples]

1. Choose the best format for a beginner

While there are a handful of sections that must be included on every resume — professional summary, work history, skills and education — how you organize the sections is very important, especially when you have no experience.

The order of your sections is based on your choice of resume format.

The three most common formats are:

• Chronological: Focuses on work history, recounting your jobs in reverse-chronological order.
• Functional: Elevates relevant skills and abilities above work history.
• Combination: Gives equal weight to skills and work experience sections.

For job seekers who have no experience, a functional resume is a safe bet.

Why? The functional resume details your skills and qualifications instead of your work history. Here’s how a functional resume is organized:

Create your resume

For tips on handling margins, resume font and more, our resume-formatting guide offers guidance. For even more insight, you can browse hundreds of resume examples for all different types of jobs and industries.

Examples can also help you with the next step in the process: picking a template.

2. Select an appropriate template

Create your resume

3. Add contact info to the header

When you write a resume without experience, your mission is to get an employer’s attention and get called for an interview. That makes your contact info extremely important and something you should highlight at the top of your document in the header.

But please note — you want your header to be clutter-free, so only include the critical info.

Your resume header should mention:

• Your name
• Phone number
• Professional email address

Some candidates — particularly those in marketing or creative fields — may also want to feature their:

• Personal website or portfolio
• Social media channels
• Headshot

You should never include:

• Photos
• Salutations
• Zodiac sign

4. Craft a great resume objective

At the top of your resume, you’ll need a professional profile. There are two types of profiles — resume summary and resume objective.

For job seekers without experience, a resume objective is clearly the best option.

Resume objectives are two- to three-sentence introductions that explain who you are and why you want to work for the employer. They are great for job seekers with no experience because they focus more on your goals and potential to contribute to the company than on your previous work experience.

Here’s an objective for a resume with no experience:

5. Add sections to replace work experience

Work experience will always be an important part of your resume, even if your job history is thin. Employers look at your track record to decide whether you can deliver on your promises.

Now, when you have no experience, what should you put in this section? You should list the full spectrum of roles you’ve had — full-time jobs aren’t the only game in town.

Before we check out the other experiences, here are a few tips for writing an excellent work history section:

• Use bullet points to make your work history easier to scan.
• Describe your experiences in terms of impact, rather than simply listing your duties.
• Don’t be afraid to include experiences you’ve picked up in school, like coursework and extracurricular activities, or outside the workplace, such as volunteer work.

OK, let’s dive deeper into the last bullet point — what experiences might qualify for your work history section when you have no formal experience?

Volunteering

Volunteering isn’t only a way to support your community — those experiences look great on your resume.

Common volunteer work includes tutoring, mentoring, fundraising, manual labor (like working at a soup kitchen) and event organizing. That said, there are literally thousands of NGOs, each one offering opportunities to build your resume.

Let’s see an example of what volunteer experience might look like:

Notice how the bullet points are just as compelling as what you’d find for a full-time position?

Now, let’s do the same rundown for what is often a job seeker’s entry point into the workplace: internships.

Internships

Internships are about more than just fetching coffee. They’re real opportunities to grow your skills and make connections that can jumpstart your career.

Internships are absolutely appropriate for a work experience section. Here’s how to package an internship role on your resume when you have no experience:

Just as you would with professional jobs, when it comes to internships, start by listing your most recent experience and working backward. That said, we’d suggest capping the number of internships at two or three. Unless you’re a recent graduate or are going to graduate soon, the employer may wonder why you haven’t found a more permanent solution.

Extracurricular activities

There’s more to college than parties and tests.

You can have more fun — and bolster your resume — by joining clubs, exploring your interests and participating in the local community via extracurricular activities.

Here are some common extracurricular activities that look great on a resume with no experience:

• Student government
• Leadership programs
• Arts organizations (for example, drama club, dance teams)
• Cultural clubs (for example, African-American Student Union)
• Publications, like the student newspaper
• Athletics, including roles on the sideline

Employers want to know you’d be a valuable member of the team and a good fit for the company. Extracurricular activities do that by showing them your talents, ambition and level of engagement.

Next, we’ll reveal how you can package these experiences in a way that will clearly transfer into the workplace.

6. Highlight your top transferable skills

Transferable skills are abilities you can take from job to job. They’re particularly useful when you don’t have any experience in your career path of choice.

You may be wondering — how do you know which transferable skills to highlight?

That’s easy. Follow this step-by-step process:

• Read the job description closely.
• Highlight the skills you find peppered throughout the listing.
• Write down any tasks you’ve done before.
• Add those bullet points to your resume skills section, using the exact language in the job description.

Make sure to look for a mix of soft skills (like teamwork, communication, problem-solving and time management) as well as hard skills and technical skills (like knowing how to operate a computer program). There are transferable skills in every category.

7. List your education and credentials

If you’re making a resume with no experience, chances are you’re in school or recently graduated, which means your education section will be more important than it is for a seasoned professional.

First, you should always list your degrees, including those you’re still working on, beginning with the most recent one and working backward. Here’s what that would look like:

Additionally, your education section offers another opportunity to emphasize relevant experience. For example, special projects could showcase your skills and capabilities in a positive light.

Here’s an excellent example of how a student with no professional experience can make their resume much more attractive by including a special project:

Special project: Successfully implemented a machine learning project that predicted fraudulent insurance claims with 70% accuracy. Concepts used include clustering, decision trees and neural networks.

Before we wrap up, there’s one more thing you might want to add to your resume — optional sections.

8. Consider optional sections

Optional sections are anything that would enhance your resume that isn’t strictly necessary.

Maybe you volunteered at your local animal shelter or learned a foreign language in your spare time. Perhaps you joined a community organization or completed a professional certification you’d been pursuing.

Any of the above would belong on your resume — but where exactly?

Start with a resume outline. Then, create section headers for any points that don’t fit into the main sections. But remember — they should be relevant to the job you’re targeting. For example, HR doesn’t need to know about your favorite computer games unless you’re applying for a role like game developer, game designer or another relevant role.

Now it’s time to finish up your resume so it’s ready to download and submit.