How to write a résumé with no work experience

The problem is not that you have nothing to say. It is that the standard résumé shape has a large section called Experience and you are being asked to leave it empty. Change the shape.

Reorder before you write

Education moves to the top. Then projects. Then any work — part-time, volunteer, freelance, campus roles. Skills near the top rather than buried at the bottom.

This is not a trick to hide a gap. It is putting the strongest evidence where it gets read, which is what every résumé should do.

Projects are the section that does the work

A project entry should read like a job entry: what you built, what you used, what happened. The failure mode is listing a title and a technology and stopping.

Weather App — React, API

Stronger:

Weather dashboard (React, OpenWeather API)
· Built a 5-day forecast view with location search and offline caching
· Handled the API's rate limit with a 10-minute cache, cutting calls ~80%
· Used by 30 people in my course; three reported bugs I fixed

The second one shows judgement, not just completion. That is what someone hiring a junior is actually looking for.

Non-obvious things that count

• Volunteering with a real responsibility — scheduling, money, coordinating people.
• Society or club roles where you organised something that had a deadline.
• Freelance work, however small, including unpaid work for a real user.
• Competitions, hackathons and open-source contributions, if you can say what you contributed.
• Part-time retail or hospitality. Reliability, handling pressure and dealing with people are not filler; write them as outcomes rather than duties.

What to leave out

• An objective statement saying you are seeking an opportunity to grow. Everyone is.
• "References available on request." Assumed.
• Skills you have read about. If you cannot answer a question on it, it is not a skill yet.
• A photo, unless the country you are applying in expects one.
• Secondary school detail once you have a degree.

Length

One page. This is the one case where the one-page rule is genuinely right — a second page early in a career is padding, and padding reads as padding.

When you do start applying, tailoring matters more than it will later, because you have fewer signals and each one counts. How to tailor a résumé to a job description covers the fifteen-minute version.