How to Write a Graduate CV for Your First Job

Leaving university with a degree and very little formal work history is a strange place to be. You know you are capable, but a blank CV template does not care about potential. It wants evidence, and you are not always sure what counts.

Writing a strong graduate CV is less about hiding your inexperience and more about presenting the right things in the right order. Employers hiring graduates already know you are early in your career. What they are really looking for is proof that you can learn quickly, work with others and apply what your degree gave you.

Lead With a Layout Built for New Starters

A seasoned professional puts work experience at the top because that is their strongest card. As a graduate, your strongest card is usually your education, so it belongs near the top instead. A layout that works well for most first-job seekers runs in this order:

• Contact details and a short personal statement
• Education, including your degree and any relevant modules
• Work experience, placements and part-time jobs
• Skills
• Extracurricular activities, volunteering and interests

Keep it to one page if you possibly can. Two pages is acceptable if you have a placement year or substantial part-time work to describe, but a padded CV works against you. Recruiters can tell the difference between a full page and a stretched one.

Open With a Personal Statement That Says Something

The few lines at the top of your CV are the first thing a recruiter reads, and generic phrasing wastes them. “A hardworking and motivated graduate seeking an opportunity” tells the reader nothing they could not have guessed.

Instead, name your field, your degree and the kind of role you want, then add one specific thing that makes you a credible candidate. Something like “Business Management graduate with a first-class degree and a year in industry at a logistics firm, where I automated a weekly reporting task that saved the team half a day.” That is concrete, and it earns attention. If this part feels awkward to write, it is worth learning how to build a personal statement that actually gets noticed rather than settling for the usual filler.

Make Your Degree Do Real Work

Your degree is more than a title and a grade. Underneath it sits a set of skills and projects that a recruiter cannot see unless you show them.

List your university, course and expected or awarded classification. Then, where it helps, add a short line or two on the parts that connect to the job. Relevant modules, a strong dissertation, a group project you led or a piece of research that involved real data all give the reader something to grip.

Frame Your Dissertation as a Project

A final-year project is a genuine piece of self-directed work, so treat it like one. Note the question you tackled, the method you used and what you found. “Conducted a six-month research project surveying 200 respondents, analysed the results in Excel and presented recommendations to staff” reads like professional experience because, in substance, it is.

Count Every Scrap of Experience

Graduates routinely undersell the work they have already done. Part-time retail, bar shifts, summer temping, a placement, a society committee role, volunteering, freelance bits and pieces all count. The key is to describe them in terms of what you achieved and the skills you built, not just the tasks you carried out.

A weekend job in a shop taught you to handle pressure, work a till accurately and calm an unhappy customer. A treasurer role in a student society means you managed a real budget and kept real records. Written well, these show reliability and transferable ability. If your paid experience is genuinely thin, our guide to writing a CV when you have little or no experience walks through how to build a convincing picture from exactly this kind of material.

Choose Skills You Can Prove

A skills section is only useful when it is honest and specific. Long lists of soft-sounding traits like “team player” and “good communicator” have been read a thousand times and mean little on their own. Employers trust skills that come attached to evidence.

Split your thinking into two rough groups:

• Practical skills: software, languages, technical tools, anything you can demonstrate
• Applied strengths: teamwork, organisation, problem solving, each tied to a real example elsewhere in the CV

So rather than claiming you are organised in a bullet point, let a line under your placement prove it: “Coordinated a team rota for eight people across a busy summer period.” The claim lands far better when the reader has already seen it in action.

Tailor It, Then Check It

One graduate CV sent to fifty employers rarely works. The strongest applicants adjust the personal statement and reorder a few skills to match each job advert, echoing the language the employer used. It takes ten minutes and it signals genuine interest.

Before anything goes out, proofread slowly and then ask someone else to read it too. At graduate level, a clean, error-free CV carries real weight, because attention to detail is one of the few things an employer can judge before they ever meet you. A single typo on a one-page document is far more visible than it would be on a crowded senior CV.

Starting your career is hard enough without wrestling a blank page into shape, and a first CV often benefits from an experienced eye that knows what graduate recruiters actually respond to. If you would like your degree, placements and early experience turned into a CV that opens doors, you can ask CV Experts to write it with you.