How to Write a Resume With No Work Experience

1. Contact details
2. Professional Summary, naming the exact role you are applying for
3. Skills, grouped and concrete
4. Education: degree, institution, graduation year, and your score if it is strong
5. Projects: two or three, with results
6. Experience: internships, part-time work, freelance work, campus roles
7. Achievements: competitions, hackathons, scholarships
8. Certifications

Once you have around two years of relevant work, move Education below Experience. The builder's Completeness Checker estimates your career stage from your dates and jobs, and changes which sections it treats as essential for a student or recent graduate.

A fresher resume fits on one page in almost all cases. If yours runs over, the resume length guide lists what to cut first.

Advice for freshers often names three resume formats. A chronological resume lists everything by date, newest first. A functional resume groups your skills and leaves out where and when you used them. A combination resume puts skills and projects first and still dates every entry.

The order above is a combination format, and it is the one to use. Skills and projects sit near the top, where a reader sees them first, and every project, internship and job still has its own dates and place. Avoid a purely functional resume. A reader cannot tell where you used each skill, and the ATS checker flags any job entry that has no start date.

Write each project like a job: a title, dates, the tools or methods used, and two or three bullets with results. A project counts when it is finished, it works, and you can explain a decision you made in it. Add a link wherever you can. The projects section guide covers how to write each entry.

• Internships, including unpaid and remote ones.
• Part-time work in any field. Retail and hospitality jobs show reliability, customer handling and working to deadlines.
• Freelance work, including one-off paid jobs.
• Campus roles such as society treasurer, lab assistant, teaching assistant or event organiser.
• Volunteering with a defined responsibility.
• Open-source contributions, including documentation.

Below is a complete one-page resume for an invented B.Tech graduate applying for a junior software developer role. Every name, number and link is made up. Read it for the order of sections and the way each entry is written.

You do not need every section. If you have no internship, leave the Experience heading off and let Projects carry the page; the ATS resume checker reports a critical issue when a resume has neither experience nor projects, and a Projects section with at least one entry clears that check. If you have no certifications, leave that heading off too. An empty or padded section looks worse than a missing one.

Look for team size on a group project, people who used something you built, students you tutored, money you handled for a society, attendance at an event you ran, your placing in a competition, or the size of a dataset you analysed. The guide to quantifying achievements shows how to find more.

An internship reviewer does not expect professional achievements. Show that you finish what you start and can work without close supervision. Evidence that someone else can check is the most useful:

If you have none of the first five yet, a practical next step is to build one small, finished project over a couple of weekends and write it up properly. The resume guides cover each section of a first resume in more detail.

• A photo, date of birth, marital status or gender, unless employers in the country where you apply expect them.
• School results once you have a degree, unless the employer asks for them.
• Hobbies, unless they relate to the job or show something your other sections do not.
• "References available on request".
• An objective that only says what you want to gain.