How to Write a Resume With No Experience (Complete 2023 Guide + Examples)

Lack of work experience won’t stop you from writing a resume that will get you hired. Employers understand that not all job seekers have work experience — after all, everyone has to start somewhere. We’ll teach you everything to know about writing an effective resume that focuses on your skills rather than non-existent work history.

The Best Format for No Work Experience

Show potential employers that you’re qualified for the job by highlighting your skills using the ideal resume format for your situation. Use this guide to learn how to write a no-experience resume by maximizing each section to showcase your skills as much as possible.

• 1. Name and contact information: This section is standard across all resumes and includes your full name, a professional email address, your phone number, and links to professional resources like an online portfolio or social media accounts.

• 2. Summary statement: This three-sentence elevator pitch summarizes how your skills and experience align with the open position. This introduction needs to compel a hiring manager enough to keep reading your resume.

• 3. Summary of qualification: This is the first skill section exclusive to functional resumes. This section helps you identify up to three of your strongest skills and share three specific examples within those skills sets.

• 4. Professional skills: This second skills section is similar to the standard skills section. Showcase six to eight different skills that directly relate to the needs of an open job position.

• 5. Relevant skills: This final skills section is a third opportunity to showcase an additional six to eight skills. You can showcase skills that are specifically requested but can smoothly transfer to the needs of the open job opportunity.

• 6. Work history: This pared-down section doesn’t tie specific dates, roles or responsibilities to former job titles or volunteer work. You can add short-term volunteer work or part-time jobs along with the “employer” without explaining the brevity of the work.

• 7. Education: This section is standard across all resumes. Include the name of the degree you’re working on or recently received, the name of the school, and dates of attendance to this section.

You can use our Resume Builder to fill in your information into this same resume template, download the document, and be on your way to ace your next interview.

Keep reading to learn how to perfect the different sections of your functional resume and make it work in your favor.

• Essential Resume Sections

  Summary statement/career objective

  The summary statement is one of the first sections an employer or hiring manager will read, so you must be strategic with it. In this section, you’ll inform the employer of your professional goals within the position and the skills you’ll use to achieve them. To figure out the right wording for your career objective, you need to thoroughly read the job description, pinpoint the main needs of the employer, and determine how to fulfill them.

  Here are some helpful examples of career objectives:

• Summary of qualifications

  Your summary of qualifications is where you’ll include all the skills you have to offer your employer. To write this section, you will list your top-three most relevant skills for the job. These can be soft, hard or technical skills, and each skill category will have one entry followed by a description of the tasks and achievements that prove you’re proficient in them.

  Below, you’ll see how various experienced job seekers use their personal and professional experience as evidence of their designated skills.

  Teacher Skills Section:

Professional skills

Besides your summary of qualifications section, you can add other sections in your resume to highlight even more of your skills. For example, you can include a listed skills section, also known as a “Professional Skills” section, where you list the six-to-eight key skills most suitable to your desired position.

Sales Associate

Education

Your education section consists of your most recent academic endeavors. Each entry should include the degree name, the school, its location and the graduation date.

If you’re a college graduate, you don’t need to list your high school graduation since everyone understands you need a high school diploma or GED to complete a bachelor’s degree.

On the other hand, high schoolers, students enrolled in college, and individuals with some college education but no degree should list their expected graduation date or the years spent studying.

These examples will help you visualize it:

How to Write a Light Work Experience

Up until now, we talked about how to highlight your skills and education. It’s time to learn how to tackle a non-existent or informal work experience. There’s a reason we recommended the functional format –– it features the shortest and less detailed version of a work history section.

This benefits you because it allows you to share short-term projects such as volunteer work, extracurricular activities or after-school jobs without sharing specific dates or responsibilities related to each entry.

How to play down your light work experience

Your limited work history will follow this simple structure:

For example, an after-school babysitter could write their experience:

A student aide could write their experience this way:

By writing the bare minimum, it enables you to showcase all of the skills and experience you do have without trying to demonstrate that you developed those skills during a short-term job or task like a four-month-long class.

How to add a volunteer or extracurricular experience

Informal jobs like babysitting, yard work or student tasks aren’t the only ways you can demonstrate formal work experience. Extracurricular activities such as volunteer work, social activism and after-school activities can demonstrate your responsibility and formal engagements.

How to share transferable skills from hobbies

Now that you know how to include your formal and informal work experience, how do you showcase the skills you learned in those jobs on your resume? For example, how do you explain your stage lighting skill for a job as a front-desk clerk?

These skills can be transferable skills. As a lighting technician for a drama club, you would have developed strong listening skills and problem-solving skills to accommodate the needs of the stage, your fellow drama club actors, and any on-stage shenanigans that required on-the-spot lighting adjustments. Showcasing those transferable skills in the previously mentioned skill sections would make you a valuable addition to a customer-service-facing role.

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