Writing a CV With Little or No Experience

What counts as experience

Employers hiring at this level are not expecting a career. They are trying to work out whether you turn up, whether you can be trusted with something, and whether somebody will have to stand over you for six months.

Anything that shows one of those counts. That includes:

• Part-time and summer work of any kind, including shops, restaurants, bars, warehouses, farms and childminding.
• College placements and internships, however short.
• Final year projects, group projects and dissertations.
• Volunteering, including coaching, tidy towns, charity shops and youth clubs.
• Clubs and societies, especially anything where you held a position or ran something.
• Sports teams you organised, fundraised for, or captained.
• Work in a family business, which people leave off constantly and should not.
• Anything you built, sold, wrote or ran on your own, however small.

A summer working weekend shifts in a busy restaurant demonstrates more about reliability under pressure than most graduates realise, and it is a great deal more convincing than describing yourself as reliable.

The order to put things in

The standard Irish CV leads with work experience. For as long as education is the strongest thing you have, put that first instead and swap them round later.

1. Name and contact details. Phone, email, LinkedIn if you have one, town and county.
2. Personal profile. Three or four lines.
3. Education. Most recent first, with the year and the result if it helps you.
4. Work experience. Anything paid, most recent first.
5. Projects, placements and volunteering. Whatever did not fit above.
6. Skills. Software, languages, certificates, a driving licence if the job needs one.
7. References available on request.

Once you have two or three years of work behind you, flip education and work experience around and let the work lead.

One page is fine here, and better than padding to two. Nobody expects a school leaver or a recent graduate to fill two pages, and stretching to fill them shows.

Turning what you have into experience

The trick is to write about what you did rather than what the position was called. A job title tells the reader almost nothing on its own.

Part-time and summer work

Look for volume, money, responsibility and trust. How many covers, how many customers, how much cash, what you were left in charge of, who you trained.

College projects

Name the project, say what you personally did, name the tools, and give the result. Group projects count, as long as you are clear about your own part.

Societies, clubs and teams

Committee positions are small management jobs. Budgets, events, recruiting members, keeping a group of volunteers turning up. Write them the same way you would write a job.

Placements

Treat a placement exactly like employment, because that is how it reads. Same format, same bullets, same focus on what changed while you were there.

Worked examples

The profile when you have no track record

Say what you have just finished, what you are aiming at, and one or two things you can actually do. Do not claim experience you do not have, and do not fill the space with adjectives.

What to leave off

• Primary school, and secondary school once you have a degree.
• Every Leaving Certificate subject and grade. Give your points total or the two or three subjects that matter for this job. A full grid of results eats a third of the page.
• Hobbies that say nothing. "Socialising with friends, music, cinema" is filler. Keep one line if something is unusual or relevant.
• Referees' names and numbers. "References available on request" is enough, and their details are not yours to publish.
• A photo, your date of birth or your PPS number. None of these belong on an Irish CV. The Irish CV template guide covers the full list.
• Made-up experience. It is checked more often than people expect, and it is a much bigger problem than having a thin CV.

If this is your first job in Ireland

Two things trip people up when they are new to the market rather than new to working.

First, put your work permission on the CV if you already hold one. A single line near your contact details, along the lines of "Stamp 4, no employer sponsorship required", removes a reason to pass over you before anyone reads further.

Second, qualifications earned abroad are worth translating. Add the QQI equivalent level in brackets where you know it, so the reader is not left guessing what your qualification is worth here.