How To Write A Resume With No Work Experience

If you don’t have any work experience, writing a resume might seem like an uphill struggle or maybe even a complete waste of time. After all, a resume is just a piece of paper with your work experience listed on, and so yours would be pretty empty, right?

Wrong.

Your resume is way more than just a list of work experience. That’s one small part of it. There’s also your personal section – contact details, career objective, personal statement (a brief bit about yourself and your personality and your hobbies); education; skills, qualifications and awards; referees and everything else.

With that said, having work experience is important and the work experience section of your resume is often the “meat” of the resume itself. So, what can you do if you don’t have any work experience?

1) Go out and get some. There are two main ways of doing this, and let me say this up front: they may not be glamorous or exciting, but sometimes you’ve just gotta do what you’ve gotta do. OK.

First, take a job that you ordinarily might not because it’s too easy/boring, or you’re overqualified, or it doesn’t pay much. You might think you’re not getting anything out of the job, but in fact you are and it’s extremely valuable: work experience to go onto your resume! You’ve only got to stay in the job for 3 to 6 months, then you can leave and chalk it up.

Second, volunteer. This might mean you can get into more prestigious companies and do more of what you enjoy and ultimately want to end up doing, but obviously you don’t get paid. The upside is that a) you’ll get plenty of valuable experience, and b) many voluntary positions often end in actual job offers. Voluntary work can last for as little as 4 weeks, or much longer if you’re part time and have some other way of earning money to sustain yourself.

2) Take your hobbies and life experiences and derive skills relevant to the job from them. For example, imagine you’ve been an active member of the local neighbourhood watch and organised meetings, patrols, collected statements and so on. What you’ve been doing is real management of people and that counts as a skill you can include on your resume.

Think about the last few years of your life, and what you’ve been doing socially, part time, as a hobby or anything else in the evenings and so on. There must be some skills you have picked up that you can present on your resume.

For more tips and tricks for writing a good resume and how to deal with a lack of education or work experience, check out www.WritingAGoodResume.net