Writing a CV when you have no work experience

Every graduate job ad seems to ask for experience, and your CV has a degree at the top and a lot of white space underneath. Here’s the thing: a CV isn’t a list of jobs. It’s evidence that you can do the work, and you almost certainly have more of that than you think.

You have more experience than you think

Employers hiring graduates know you haven’t had a full-time job yet. What they’re looking for is proof that you can turn up, take responsibility, work with people and finish things. All of these count:

• Part-time and holiday work: till shifts, waitering, call centres, deliveries, helping in a family business.
• Leadership on campus: class rep, res committee, society treasurer, sports captain.
• Teaching others: tutoring, mentoring first-years, Sunday school, coaching a junior team.
• Projects: your final-year project, a research assignment, a hackathon, anything you built or ran.
• Volunteering: at a church, NGO, clinic, school or community event.
• Side hustles: selling online, doing hair, designing posters for friends’ businesses.

Turn what you did into evidence

The difference between a weak CV and a strong one is usually not what the person did. It’s how they wrote it. Weak lines describe a role. Strong lines show what you did and what changed because of it, ideally with a number.

A simple pattern works: what you did + how + the result.

	Weak	Strong
Tutoring	Tutor for first-year Accounting	Tutored 12 first-year Accounting students weekly for two years; 10 passed the module
Society	Treasurer of the hiking club	Managed a R40 000 club budget and cut transport costs by 15% by booking group rates
Part-time job	Cashier at a pharmacy	Handled about 150 customers per Saturday shift and balanced the till without errors for 18 months
Project	Final-year research project	Analysed 3 years of a small business's sales data and presented cost-saving options to the owner

Only use numbers you can stand behind in an interview. “About 150 customers” is fine if that’s an honest estimate. A made-up figure is easy to catch with one follow-up question.

What goes on page one

Recruiters often decide whether to keep reading from the top third of page one, so put your strongest material there. For a graduate, this order works well:

• Contact details: your name, phone number, a professional-looking email address, your town or suburb, and a LinkedIn link if you have a profile.
• Profile: three lines saying who you are, what you’re good at and the kind of role you want. Rewrite it for each type of job.
• Key skills: five or six that match the job ad, such as Excel, Xero, customer service, report writing or Python. Only list what you could show someone.
• Education: degree, institution, year completed and major subjects. Add your average if it helps you. Matric needs one line, not a list of subjects.
• Experience and projects: the evidence lines from above, newest first. Call the section “Experience and projects” so it’s clear it isn’t only paid work.

Page two is for the extras: languages you speak (a real advantage in South Africa), a driver’s licence and its code, relevant short courses, and references.

What to leave off

Some things that appear on many South African CVs do more harm than good:

• Your ID number, date of birth and marital status. They aren’t needed to judge your application, and an ID number on a document you send to strangers is an identity-theft risk. Give it when an employer formally asks, on an application form or when you’re hired.
• Your full street address. Your town or suburb is enough.
• A photo, unless the ad asks for one.
• Salary expectations, unless the ad asks. Leave that conversation for the interview.
• “References available on request.” Either list them or leave the line out.

Make it fit the job you’re applying for

Sending the same CV to fifty ads feels efficient, but it rarely works. Before each application, spend ten minutes on the top third:

• Rewrite your profile so it names the kind of role in the ad.
• Reorder your skills so the ones the ad mentions come first, using the same words the ad uses. Many large employers use software that scans CVs for those words before a person sees them.
• Move your most relevant evidence line to the top of its section.

Keep the layout plain: one column, a common font, clear headings and no graphics or tables. Fancy templates can confuse that scanning software. Save it as a PDF called something like Lerato-Dlamini-CV.pdf, not CV final final 2.pdf.

References

Two references are plenty. Good choices are a lecturer or supervisor who knows your work, and a manager from a part-time job or volunteer role. For each, give their name, role, how they know you, a phone number and an email address.

Always ask them first, and tell them which jobs you’re applying for. A reference who is expecting the call will say far more useful things than one caught off guard.

Where to send it

Company careers pages and the big job sites are the obvious places. Two free options are built for young South Africans in particular:

• SA Youth (sayouth.mobi) is a government-backed platform run by Harambee. It’s free and doesn’t use your mobile data. You build a profile once and get matched to opportunities near where you live. It’s open to 18 to 34-year-olds.
• The YES programme (Youth Employment Service) places unemployed young people in 12-month paid work experience roles at companies across the country. Roles are advertised on SA Youth and on the companies’ own careers pages, and each one sets its own age limit and requirements, so read the ad closely.

A year in a YES role is exactly the kind of experience that fills the gap on your next CV.

• It’s two pages or less
• The profile and skills match this specific job ad
• Every experience line shows what you did and the result
• There’s no ID number, date of birth or marital status
• Your email address looks professional
• Your references have agreed to be contacted
• Someone else has read it for spelling and typos
• It’s saved as a PDF with your name in the file name

Try this today: set a timer for 20 minutes and list everything you’ve done since matric that took real effort, paid or not. Pick your three strongest and rewrite each one as an evidence line. That’s the heart of your new CV.