Writing a graduate CV when you have no experience
Start with the thing almost nobody checks. We searched 12,914 live UK graduate adverts for a stated number of years of experience. 2.1% ask for one — 268 adverts. A further 398 say outright that no experience is needed.
12,914 adverts checkedCounted 5 November 2026
The premise of the question is mostly wrong
Graduate schemes exist because employers have decided to hire people without the experience. That is the product. An advert demanding three years of it is either not a graduate role or is badly written, and in this feed it is rare enough to be a rounding error.
What they ask for instead is on the record. Teamwork appears in 55.7% of adverts. Customer service — which is a supermarket shift, a bar job, a call centre — appears in 15.2%. The full count is here.
So the problem is not usually that you have nothing. It is that the things you have are written in a way that does not read as evidence.
Four things that count, in order of how much
Not because they sound impressive — because each one lets you write a sentence with a situation, a decision and an outcome in it, which is the only shape a recruiter can do anything with.
A dissertation or final-year project
The single most underused thing on a graduate CV. It is months of independent work with a method, a dataset or a body of reading, and a result you had to defend. Most people give it one line naming the title. It deserves three: what the question was, how you went about it, and what you found.
“Modelled collection routing for a food bank network across six months of records; found the waste was in how collections were booked rather than in the routes. Cut half-empty runs from 31 to 12 in testing.”
Part-time and vacation work
Retail, hospitality, warehouse, care, tutoring. People leave these off a CV because they feel unrelated, which is the wrong test — nobody is checking whether you sold the right product. They are checking whether you have held responsibility in front of other people under time pressure, and these are the only evidence most graduates have of that.
“Explained declined payments to around 40 customers a week on a service desk, and wrote the one-page crib sheet the weekend staff still use.”
A society, team or committee role
Specifically the roles where you had to get something done through people who could walk away — treasurer, events, captain, course rep. That is harder than managing employees and it is the closest most students come to the thing graduate schemes are testing for.
“Ran ticketing for six society events; moved a shared list onto a single approver after we double-sold twice, and it did not happen again.”
Anything you built, ran or organised on your own
A spreadsheet somebody else adopted, a society’s social media, a fundraiser, a side project, a tournament. It does not need to be technical and it does not need to have succeeded. It needs to be something nobody asked you to do, which is the definition of the initiative named in 19.2% of adverts.
“Built the budget tracker for a 200-person ball in Excel — VLOOKUP and pivot tables — and handed it to the following year’s committee.”
What this page is not saying
That a Saturday job is secretly senior management. It is not, and writing it as though it were is transparent and slightly embarrassing — "spearheaded customer engagement initiatives" on a CV means somebody worked a till and would rather you did not know.
The shift counts for exactly what it was: you turned up, you dealt with people who were sometimes difficult, you were trusted with money and with opening or closing. Written plainly, that is more persuasive than any amount of inflation, because the reader has done a job like it and can tell.
The order to put it in
With no graduate-level work history, education goes first — degree, university, grade or predicted grade, then the dissertation and any modules that genuinely relate to the role. Not all of them. The ones that relate.
Then experience, most recent first, with the detail concentrated in whichever one is most relevant rather than spread evenly. Then projects and positions of responsibility, then a short skills list of checkable things only.
One page is right for most people in this position. Two padded pages read worse than one full one.
Method
Counted on 5 November 2026 across 12,914 live UK graduate, placement, internship and apprenticeship adverts read from employers' own careers pages. "Asks for years of experience" means the advert text states a number of years; an employer who wants experience without saying how much is not counted, so 2.1% is a floor. Everything else on this page is judgement, and is written as such.
Doing it for every advert
The hard part is not writing one good CV. It is deciding, for each advert, which of your four or five real things to lead with and which to cut. Gradovio does that against the specific advert, then drafts the cover letter and fills the form.
Start a free trial — 13,277 live graduate roles to point it at.