How to Make a Resume for Your First Job

You want to make a resume for your first job and you have nothing to put in the work section. That is the whole problem, and it feels bigger than it is.

You are not being compared to people with ten years behind them. You are being compared to the other people applying for a first job. None of them has a work history either. What separates you from them is what you did with what you had.

Put education first, and put it at the top

Your school is the strongest thing you have, so the reader should meet it immediately. Name the school, the qualification and the year you finish or finished.

If your grades are good, include them. If they are not, leave them out. Nobody will ask why they are missing, and a weak number is worse than no number.

Add the coursework only if it is relevant to the job. A statistics module belongs on an application for a data role. It does not belong on one for a café.

You have more experience than you think

You are probably discounting things because nobody paid you for them. Stop doing that. A reader wants evidence you turn up and finish things.

• Part-time and weekend work. Any of it. Retail and hospitality teach you more about handling people than most office jobs.
• Volunteering. A charity shift is a shift.
• Coursework projects, if you built or produced something. Say what it was and what it did.
• Societies and clubs, especially if you ran something. Treasurer of anything means you handled money and reported on it.
• Family or community work you were relied on for.

Write each one the way you would write a job. What you did, and what was different afterwards. "Ran the till on Saturdays" is thin. "Ran the till on the shop's busiest day and trained two new starters on it" is not.

Write about scale, because you have no numbers

You will not have revenue figures. You do have size and frequency, and those work just as well.

How many people, how often, how much. "Served around a hundred customers a shift" tells a reader something real. "Excellent customer service skills" does not, because anybody can type it.

This is the same rule that applies to a senior resume. Say what happened, not what you are like. It is easier when you have less, not harder.

Keep it to one page, and let it breathe

One page is right for you. Not because one page is a rule — it is not, and there is more to say about length — but because a second page at this stage can only be filler.

Do not stretch to fill the page either. White space is fine. A short, clean, specific page reads as somebody who knows what matters. A padded one reads as somebody who does not.

Things to leave out entirely: an objective saying you are seeking a challenging role, "references available on request", your full address, your date of birth, and a photo if you are applying in the US, UK, Canada or Australia.

Say what you are aiming at, briefly

You can use two lines at the top to say who you are and what you want. Keep it factual.

"Final-year economics student looking for a junior analyst role. Comfortable with Excel and SQL from coursework and a summer internship." That is useful. It tells the reader where to file you before they read anything else.

What is not useful is the version everybody writes: "A motivated and hardworking individual seeking to leverage my skills in a dynamic environment." Every applicant claims that, so it distinguishes nobody.

Keep the layout ordinary

You will be tempted by a template with a coloured sidebar, because your page looks empty and the design fills it. Do not.

Most first jobs are applied for online, through a system that pulls the text out of your file before a person sees it. A side column can end up read straight through the middle of your education section. You would never find out — you would just never hear back.

One column, ordinary headings, a normal font. If you want the page to look considered, do it with spacing and with the right typeface, neither of which costs you anything.

What to do tonight

• Write down every unpaid thing you have done that involved turning up, and treat each one as a job.
• Give each of them a number: how many, how often, how long.
• Put education at the top with the year, and grades only if they help you.
• Delete the objective and write two factual lines instead.
• Leave the empty space alone.

The first resume is the hardest one you will write. Every one after it is an edit.