Early career
Graduate with no work experience resume example
The hardest case, and the one most examples skip: a first resume with no employment history at all.
Invented for this page. The name, the employers and every number in it are made up — a real resume is somebody’s personal data and is not ours to publish.
Rohan Bhatt
rohan@example.com | +91 20 5555 0184 | Pune, India
Summary
Final-year information technology student. Built and shipped three projects that other people use, and taught first-year programming for two semesters.
Education
BTech, Information Technology
Aug 2022 – May 2026
College of Engineering Pune, Pune, India, 8.7 CGPA
Skills
Languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL
Tools: React, PostgreSQL, Git, Linux
Projects
Campus Placement Portal
Jan 2024 – May 2024
Team Lead
Built a placement portal used by 900 students across 14 departments in its first semester.
Cut shortlisting time from three days to under an hour by automating eligibility filtering.
Teaching Assistant, Programming Fundamentals
Aug 2024 – Apr 2025
Department of IT
Ran weekly lab sessions for 60 first-year students across two semesters and marked 340 submissions.
Wrote the debugging guide the department now issues to all 240 incoming students each year.
Inter-college Hackathon
Feb 2025 – Feb 2025
Backend
Placed 12th of 340 teams in 36 hours with a transit-delay predictor built on open GTFS feeds.
Why it is written this way
Projects lead, and Experience is absent rather than empty
A section with nothing under it advertises the gap. Leaving it out and leading with evidence does not — and the builder reorders the steps this way when you say you have no experience yet.
Coursework and competitions are quantified like jobs
“Placed 12th of 340 teams” is a number, and numbers are what most first resumes lack. The hackathon that did not win still had a scale.
It is one page and does not pad
A short honest resume beats a long one stretched with “Microsoft Word” and “hard-working team player”. There is nothing here that a reader would skip.
The teaching-assistant work counts
Paid or not, it is a role with a scope, a duration and an outcome — which is the definition the Experience section actually uses.
Shapes to fill in
Each blank is yours to complete. These are the same scaffolds the builder offers for this occupation — none of them says anything until you fill it in, which is what keeps them useful rather than a lie somebody else wrote.
Made something faster or cheaper
- Cut ___ from ___ to ___ by ___
- Reduced ___ by ___% by ___
- Removed ___ from ___, saving ___ per ___
- Automated ___, taking it from ___ of manual work to ___
Shipped something
- Shipped ___, used by ___
- Built ___ that ___, replacing ___
- Launched ___ in ___, ___ ahead of ___
- Delivered ___ across ___ with ___
Improved quality or reliability
- Cut ___ defects from ___ to ___ by ___
- Raised ___ from ___ to ___ over ___
- Eliminated ___, ending ___ that had cost ___
- Introduced ___, cutting ___ incidents by ___%
Also called
.NET Developer · Android Developer · AngularJS Developer · Apache Hadoop Developer · Application Architect · Application Developer · Application Integration Engineer · Application Integrator · Application Support Engineer · Application Systems Architect
From the O*NET occupation database. Worth checking which of these a posting uses, because that is the wording its keyword search will be built on.
What a parser reads from this resume
This is the actual plain-text output for the document above — the same text an applicant tracking system extracts, and the same text this app hands you when you download the .txt. Nothing is lost between the page and the parser, which is the whole argument for a single column of real text.
Rohan Bhatt rohan@example.com | +91 20 5555 0184 | Pune, India SUMMARY Final-year information technology student. Built and shipped three projects that other people use, and taught first-year programming for two semesters. EDUCATION BTech, Information Technology | Aug 2022 - May 2026 College of Engineering Pune, Pune, India, 8.7 CGPA SKILLS Languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL Tools: React, PostgreSQL, Git, Linux PROJECTS Campus Placement Portal | Jan 2024 - May 2024 Team Lead - Built a placement portal used by 900 students across 14 departments in its first semester. - Cut shortlisting time from three days to under an hour by automating eligibility filtering. Teaching Assistant, Programming Fundamentals | Aug 2024 - Apr 2025 Department of IT - Ran weekly lab sessions for 60 first-year students across two semesters and marked 340 submissions. - Wrote the debugging guide the department now issues to all 240 incoming students each year. Inter-college Hackathon | Feb 2025 - Feb 2025 Backend - Placed 12th of 340 teams in 36 hours with a transit-delay predictor built on open GTFS feeds.