How to Write a Resume with Limited Work Experience

“I’m graduating next month and I need a resume, but I don’t know where to start because I don’t have any work experience!” We hear this thing all the time at Gradly. First, get started building your resume earlier! And secondly, even if you don’t have much (or any) work experience, don’t worry, because there are tried and true methods of creating a really great resume even in the absence of prior jobs. Also, keep in mind that your potential employers 1) are not going to expect you to have a ton of experience in the first place when you’re just graduating college, and 2) are hiring for evidence of your ability, not necessarily for your years of experience. So with this in mind, your goal is to assemble this evidence from projects, service in the community, and credentials (if possible).

Personal projects that show outcomes

Almost everyone has undertaken personal projects, and if you're a student about to complete college, you can probably think of several projects you’ve worked on right off the top of your head. Maybe you built an app that helps other students track deadlines? Maybe you worked with a nonprofit and helped to increase their social media presence? Maybe you analyzed recycling habits on campus to promote sustainability? These can really be almost anything as long as you can speak to the actions you undertook, the tools you used, and the impact the project had. For instance, maybe that app had over 100 users within just three months. Or maybe that nonprofit saw their follower count increase by 50% while you were managing their account. Or perhaps you presented your findings on the recycling project to the university sustainability board?

For your resume, choose at least a couple of projects and try your best to align them to the target role if possible. If you’re applying for a software job, highlight the app you built on the side. If you’re applying to a marketing position, talk about the social media project. Format each of these projects in terms of 1) Objective, 2) Action, 3) Result, and make sure to include a link if at all possible, like a live online demo, a report PDF, the nonprofit’s social media account, etc. For any project you highlight, prioritize mentioning lightweight metrics to the extent you can like the number of users, number of downloads, dollars saved, number of followers gained, increased % of user engagement, and so on. Lastly, it is very important to mention if you also collaborated with others in the process. You can say things like “worked with two classmates, handled UI development,” or “partnered with university for data access,” or “coordinated with internal marketing team on a weekly basis.”

Experience without a paycheck: Volunteering

If you’ve been involved at all with your university or community over the past four years, you have likely accumulated one or two examples of volunteer experience that you can cite on your resume. Perhaps you served as an event coordinator for Habitat for Humanity for one summer. Or maybe you were the Treasurer for the university debate club. Maybe you did tutoring in math for students at the local community center. All of these experiences may seem relatively minor or insignificant from your perspective, but these are wonderful examples of volunteer experience that you can highlight in the absence of past job experiences.

For any example of volunteer experience that you can come up with to pad your resume, treat it almost like a job, e.g. it has a title, associated organization, dates, but then most importantly, the scope of your involvement and quantifiable results. Talk about not just your responsibilities at the organization but what you achieved instead (ideally in the format of problem, action, outcome). Maybe as an event coordinator, you saw declining attendance year over year, launched an email campaign, and in turn boosted turnout by 40%. Maybe as Treasurer of the debate club you observed that the club overspent in the prior year so you introduced Excel-based expense tracking which ensured all club trips were fully funded. Do your best to map these volunteer roles to job-ready skills like leadership, client service, operations, logistics, or QA work, which will help you better tailor these examples to potential job openings, and will help employers better visualize you in those roles as well.

Other more formal signals

Another category of material you can leverage for your resume that often gets skipped by job-seekers are things like certifications. These can carry real weight if they are industry-recognized/issued and are relevant to the role that you’re applying for. A few examples in tech might be “AWS Certified,” or “GA4 Certified,” but even things like Excel or Adobe certificates can serve as a quick and easy signal to potential employers that you know your stuff. When you list these, always make sure to include who issued the certification, the level, the year you completed it, and if applicable a link or ID so that it can be verified. Make sure to pick the certifications you want to highlight wisely (put the most meaningful at the top), and do not include too many! Three certifications is more than enough.

Academic outputs can also serve as excellent proof points when you’re running light on work history. Capstone projects and research papers are all fair game as long as they encompass a substantive amount of work and have a clear connection to the skills that prospective employers are going to be looking for. For example, if you did a senior project on optimizing delivery routes with machine learning, summarize the findings in one sentence and include a link to the report or paper if you can. If you presented at a conference, include the title of the presentation, where you presented, and again, one sentence on your findings.

The key with both certifications and these more academic examples is recency and relevance. If a credential has become outdated (think an entry-level Excel certificate from five years ago), don’t include it. In fact, only include a certification when there is a clear connection to the position, else you’ll just be creating distractions in your story. When done right, though, inclusion of academic work and certifications can really help to flesh out a resume that is otherwise suffering from too little information.

Summing it up

At the end of the day, a resume with very limited work experience doesn’t have to look limited at all. Recruiters are not scanning for job titles alone, they’re also looking for evidence that you take initiative, solve problems, and can synthesize results. Side projects, volunteer work, certifications, or capstone projects all accomplish that goal if you can manage to frame them the right way. If you put in the work to format this experience clearly and quantify the impact you had, you’ll end up with a resume that feels just as strong as someone who has already spent years building their career. Remember, the story isn’t “I don’t have experience,” it’s “here’s some evidence that I can succeed at your company,” and that’s exactly what employers want.