It is 11pm. The job advert is open in one tab, a blank CV in another, and the cursor keeps blinking beside the word “Experience”.
If that feels familiar, you are in good company. Your work history might be a part-time job, a short placement and a few weekend shifts, while most of your recent effort went into university. You are not sure any of it belongs on a professional CV.
Here is the reassuring part. The problem is rarely that you have nothing to offer. It is usually that you are looking at your experience from the wrong angle.
Why your experience counts for more than you think
UK graduate employers are not expecting a ten-year career from you. They want enough evidence to see how you work, what you could contribute and whether your background connects to the role. Your job is to show that honestly.
Your degree has already given you material. A dissertation means setting your own research question, weighing up sources, analysing information and keeping a long project on track. A group assignment means sharing out tasks, working through disagreements and presenting one joint result.
So swap one question for another. Stop asking, “Does this look like a proper job?” Start asking, “What did I actually do here that could matter to this employer?”
What actually counts as experience
Take Priya, who is applying for a graduate marketing role. She has never worked in marketing, but she helped her university society promote a charity quiz night. She wrote the posts, checked timings, answered questions and helped run the event on the day.
That is not marketing employment, and she should never present it as such. It is still genuine evidence of communication, organisation and audience awareness, which is exactly what a marketing recruiter wants to see.
Now consider Tom, who spent two years working evenings in a restaurant. It looks unrelated to an office-based scheme. Yet he dealt with difficult customers, kept calm through busy Friday nights and turned up reliably alongside his degree.
Many students who search for how to write my cv end up buried in templates and layout tips. Design does matter, but it is the smaller part of the job. A polished page cannot rescue vague wording, whereas an honest link between what you have done and what the employer needs will carry a plain one.
Four ideas that make a CV convincing
Relevance beats impressiveness
Your most impressive experience is not always your most useful one. For a laboratory placement, a research project will do more for you than an old school award. For a customer-facing role, your hospitality work may be the strongest card you hold.
Evidence beats labels
Anyone can write “excellent communication skills”. Showing where you used them is far more persuasive.
- Weak: “Excellent communication and teamwork skills.”
- Better: “Worked with four classmates to divide research tasks, combine findings and deliver a joint presentation.”
Contribution, not just participation
Saying you “completed a group project” tells the reader very little. Did you review the literature, analyse the findings or build the slides? Those details turn an ordinary task into useful evidence.
Context gives skills meaning
“Organisation” means little on its own. Organising what? Balancing a dissertation, three modules and twenty hours of paid work every week means something. So does arranging volunteers for a society event.
How to read the vacancy properly
Go beyond the job title and the opening paragraph. Read the responsibilities and the person specification, then highlight anything that appears more than once. Those repeated themes tell you what the employer cares about most.
Say a graduate scheme asks for strong analytical skills. Don’t just add “analytical thinker” to your skills section. Look back through your work instead. Perhaps you compared competing sources for your dissertation, analysed survey results, or worked out why a process kept going wrong at work and suggested a practical fix.
The same applies to teamwork, communication and problem-solving. Search your own experience first, then choose the examples that fit the vacancy most naturally.
A simple method for building your bullets
Start somewhere less intimidating than the CV itself. Open a separate document and list everything you have done since starting university: coursework, your dissertation, presentations, placements, volunteering, societies, part-time jobs and competitions. Don’t worry about sounding professional yet.
Under each entry, write down what you personally did. For a retail job, that might be handling customer enquiries, processing transactions, restocking shelves and coping with busy periods. Then ask three questions: what did I do, how did I do it and why was it useful?
Instead of “Helped with university society events”, you might write:
“Helped organise society events by coordinating volunteer tasks, communicating arrangements to members and supporting activities on the day.”
Nothing there is exaggerated. It simply gives the reader a clearer picture. Keep the wording accurate: if you assisted, say assisted, and if you led, explain what you led.
Finally, read the CV as if you were a stranger. Can you see what you contributed? Is there evidence behind each skill? If not, improve the evidence rather than adding another paragraph of adjectives.
Mistakes to avoid
- Starting with “I don’t have enough experience.” That belief makes you ignore useful material. Lacking direct industry experience is not the same as having nothing to show.
- Sounding corporate for the sake of it. A university assignment does not need to become a “strategic consultancy project”. If you researched, analysed and presented, say exactly that.
- Copying the advert. Repeating “excellent problem-solving skills” proves nothing. Describe a time you genuinely solved a problem.
- Taking the whole group’s credit. Calling yourself a “project manager” after coordinating a four-person assignment can unravel when an interviewer asks what you actually decided. Explain your own part.
- Listing duties without contribution. “Attended meetings” is rarely interesting. Did you prepare information, offer ideas or record actions?
- Leaving out ordinary jobs. A part-time job is not irrelevant just because it has nothing to do with your degree. Reliability and handling pressure count.
- Inventing results. Never add percentages or achievements just to make a bullet look better. If you can’t comfortably explain it in an interview, leave it out.
Bringing it together
The hardest part of a graduate CV is rarely the writing. It is recognising the value in experiences that felt ordinary at the time. That dissertation involved real decisions about sources and conclusions, and that group project meant fitting your work into a shared result.
Choose evidence that fits the vacancy, explain your own contribution and replace empty claims with examples. Keep the tone confident but honest.
You are not trying to convince anyone you are already a finished professional. You are showing what you have done so far and why you are ready for the next step. At the start of a career, that is enough.