How to Make a Great Resume With No Experience

If you’re reading this and wondering how you’ll get that call for an interview, don’t worry—everyone has to start somewhere! Although the job market is more competitive than ever, the trick is knowing how to market yourself.

We’ll cover how to make a resume when you have no experience so you can stand out from the crowd.

Focus on Your Skills

Anyone who has been involved in the hiring process long enough knows that skills are just as important as experience. If you’re writing a resume without work experience, it’s essential to highlight both your technical and durable skills.

Some examples of durable or soft skills include:

• Critical thinking
• Creative problem-solving
• Leadership
• Management
• Fast learning
• Communication
• Negotiation
• Multilingualism
• And more

These are the skills that don’t strictly come from a textbook. Employers know this, so it’s important to highlight them on your resume so they know you have a skill that can’t easily be taught.

However, technical skills are important to highlight, too. If you have a certification from a technical course, mention it on your resume—especially if it’s relevant to the job’s requirements. Potential employers want to know about the coding languages you’ve learned and your forklift certification since it shows you’re a potential asset to the company.

Highlight Your Non-Work Experience

Even if you don’t have much job experience that’s relevant to the position you’re applying for, it’s still important to highlight your achievements and what you’ve done—and how.

If you can show results, highlight them in your resume.

For example, if you found a way to make your manufacturing company safer and it ultimately reduced lost time accidents for your team, highlight that. Otherwise, if you managed to improve customer satisfaction rating by decreasing wait times for your products, show that as well. After all, this is your chance to show off your achievements and prove that you can use them as a stepping stone to help the company succeed.

Include a Summary Statement

When you have a low-experience resume, it can be helpful to include a summary statement. This is especially true if you’re changing industries or provide context as to why you feel you’d be a good fit for the position and organization.
The summary statement can act as a supplement to a cover letter or a way to highlight your strengths, goals, and relevant skills.

Your summary statement should be brief. It should also highlight:

• Who you are
• What you’re looking for
• A taste of your capabilities
• What you bring to the team

Emphasize Your Education

Whether you’re fresh out of high school or you never had the chance to get a college degree, you can still emphasize your education to get the hiring team’s attention. Plenty of people get rewarding, high-paying jobs without a bachelor’s degree.

In the section of your resume covering your education, emphasize the relevant skills you’ve learned. List the certifications you’ve earned and online courses you’ve taken, especially if they’re relevant to the position you’re applying for.

Review the Job Description

Understanding the job description means understanding what the employer is looking for. You don’t have to match the description identically, but you do need to adjust your resume so you can pitch yourself as a match.

If you have any skills listed in the job description as either requirements or pluses, mention them in the relevant sections. They’re looking for someone who can fill the role they need to fill, but you can also show them that you’re human.

Use a Template

If you need to write a resume with no experience, one step you can take is using a free template. At SkillUp, we provide a free Key Skills Summary template that acts as a functional resume format. We also have a chronological SnapShot resume and other tools you can use to build a clear, structured highlight of your experience and the unique skills you have to offer.

Include a Cover Letter

Writing cover letters can feel like a chore, especially when you’re trying to flood the market in your job search. However, they serve as the introduction to your story and let you show them why you’re a good fit.

Keep some of the key points of your experience and why you’re interested in the job on hand for every cover letter you write—that way, you don’t have to completely rewrite and rehash every single point you want to make and can keep your cover letter focused.

Write Confidently

Writing a resume requires more than just a list of your skills—it needs to show a snapshot of your pride in your achievements and confidence in your capabilities. You put a lot of work into the things you highlight on your resume, so show pride in them!

However, there are some general rules we recommend following when you’re writing:

• Make each bullet point about your experience or achievements no more than one line long.
• Keep each point concise.
• Use a clean format in black and white, ideally with a basic font. Remember that the HR representative reading your resume is likely using a computer or AI program to help them find relevant candidates.

Also, since it needs to be said: Proofread your resume. And have a friend read through it. Even if you’ve read and reread it a hundred times, another set of eyes can catch typos you wouldn’t have spotted otherwise.