How to write your first resume with no formal work experience

A first resume is not an empty resume. It is a document that turns things you have already done — school, informal work, helping at home, community activities, courses you finished on your phone — into a format an employer can read in thirty seconds. Nothing on it has to be invented.

What counts as experience

Recruiters are looking for evidence that you show up, follow instructions, and handle responsibility. That evidence does not have to come from a payroll job.

• Paid work without a contract: market stalls, deliveries, hairdressing, repairs, childcare.
• Family business work: serving customers, stocking, cash handling, bookkeeping.
• Volunteering: church, sports club, neighbourhood association, school committee.
• School and course projects with a concrete output.
• Self-taught skills you can demonstrate: a language, spreadsheets, driving, basic electrics.

Informal work is not a marginal case. The International Labour Organization estimates that around six in ten workers worldwide are employed informally, which means most first-time applicants have done real work that never appeared on a contract. There is a separate guide on how to add informal work to a resume.

The structure that works

With little formal history, order matters more than length. Put the sections that carry evidence first and keep the whole document to one page.

• Name, city, phone, email.
• A two-line objective.
• Education, including unfinished studies with the years attended.
• Experience — informal, family or volunteer work, most recent first.
• Courses and certificates, with the issuing organisation.
• Skills and languages.

Writing the objective

Two sentences: what you are looking for, and what you already bring. Avoid adjectives you cannot back up (“highly motivated professional”), and name the type of role.

Describing what you did

Each entry needs a task and a result. A result can be a number, a frequency, or a responsibility — it does not need to be a business metric.

Skills you can prove

List skills you could demonstrate if you were asked in the interview. Group them so the page stays readable: customer contact, tools and software, languages, licences. Europass, the European Commission’s CV framework, recommends describing skills through what you have actually done with them rather than as a bare list of labels.

Mistakes to avoid

• Inventing a job title or a company that never employed you.
• Filling the page with hobbies to reach a certain length.
• Adding a photo when the local hiring culture does not expect one.
• Using an email address you no longer read.
• Writing a second page. With no formal jobs, one page is the correct length.

Final checklist

• Every entry has a date range.
• Every entry has one concrete task and one concrete outcome.
• The phone number and email are correct and reachable.
• Nothing on the page would surprise you if an interviewer asked about it.
• The file is a PDF, named with your own name.

When the content is ready, you can create your free resume and download it as a PDF without creating an account.