Jen David 
Start your career with a confidence-building, recruiter-impressing CV
Whether you're looking for a job to support you through university or taking your first serious steps on the career ladder, how you present yourself has never been more important. You may be ready and willing, but with only 57% of students finding work within 15 months of graduating, competition is fierce. We're here to help. We'll explain how to write a CV, with some CV examples for students that you can use as inspiration.
Why do you need a CV?
When hiring managers have a vacancy, they often need to narrow down a large volume of applicants. By reviewing the CVs of everyone interested in the role, they can make sure they're only inviting the candidates with the most potential to interview.
That means your CV needs to present the very best version of you, emphasising all the skills, experience, and qualifications that will make the hiring manager sit up, take notice, and, ultimately, request an interview. As the first impression you'll make on your potential new employer, your CV has to tick all the right boxes.
Staring at a blank sheet of paper and wondering how you can transform it into an impressive story of your career (particularly when you don't have a career to speak of yet!) can be daunting. The good news is that there's key information that a recruiter will expect to see, in a certain format, and if you can nail that then you're half-way there. Without further ado, let's dive into writing a CV for students.
How to structure a student CV
Start by adding the section headers. When you've got this basic structure in place, adding the detail becomes much easier. These are the main sections you'll need, and the information a recruiter will expect to find there:
Heading
Use your name as the title of the document. This can be in a larger font than the other headings. Then simply follow it with your contact details – mobile number, email address, and your location. If you have a LinkedIn profile, add the URL so that recruiters can find you easily online. If you don't have a profile yet, consider setting one up! It's a great way to build your professional network and get found by recruiters.
Location can be tricky to decide for university students. Should you use your home address, or term-time address? What if you're willing to move to wherever you can find a job? No problem. Change the location on your CV depending on where you're applying – for example if you're at university in Bath and applying for jobs in Bath, use that as your location. If you're planning on moving back home when you've finished studying, use your home location. Either way, you can add “willing to relocate” or “willing to travel” if the job you're applying for is somewhere else entirely.
Profile
The profile (or summary) can be the trickiest part of the CV to write, which is why we recommend completing the rest of the document first. That way, you'll have your personal sales pitch clear in your head. That's exactly what this section is – your personal sales pitch. You'll need to write 3-4 sentences summarising your expertise and what you can offer to a business. To get clues about what the company is looking for, check out their job advert and use this paragraph to show how you meet their key criteria.
Skills
As a student, you may not have many job-specific hard skills at this stage, so may need to rely on soft, or transferable, skills. Take inspiration from your studies and any part-time jobs or internships you've held.
While a CV for someone with strong professional experience may present skills simply as keywords, a student CV could include examples of when each skill has been used to bolster the credibility of the document.
Expert tip: Check out this blog on the top skills that employers are looking for.
Qualifications
For students, this section of the CV will do a lot of heavy lifting for you. You'll need to add the level of each qualification, the subject, the awarding institution, and the year of completion at a minimum.
Depending on the level of the course, you could also add additional information. For example, topics covered, modules completed, skills gained, thesis titles, and so on. The key here is to keep it relevant to the roles you're applying for.
Experience
When completing this section, it's important to bear in mind that it's not just full-time, permanent, paid work that counts here. You may have gained experience in any of the following ways:
-
Work experience whilst at school or college
-
Internships
-
Holiday jobs
-
Weekend work
-
Informal tasks for friends, family, and neighbours
-
Responsibilities at extra-curricular clubs
-
Unpaid roles at college or university
For each position you choose to include, add a job title (just choose something descriptive and appropriate if you didn't have an official title), the name of your employer (or club or university) and the dates you carried out that role (just month and year will suffice). For informal work such as babysitting, you can use “self-employed” or “freelance” rather than an employer name.
Below this subheading, summarise what you did, explain the skills you used or gained, and, if possible, add an achievement or two. In this context, an achievement is something that benefitted your employer, not something personal to you.
Further details
The main sections required on a student CV are listed above… but what else can you offer? If you can think of anything that could set you apart from other applicants, this is the place to mention it. Maybe you speak another language, are a whizz with a particular IT application, or have completed a project or a course in your spare time.
How to format a student CV
A student CV should be presented just as professionally as a CV for an established worker. A flash of colour is fine, but don't be tempted by the over-formatted student CV templates that you can find online – they don't perform well when scanned by an applicant tracking system (ATS) – and put style over content.
Instead, choose a standard, sans-serif font in a single-column format. Avoid graphics, icons, and logos – not only are they distracting, but again they don't transfer well into ATS. Photos are certainly to be avoided, due to anti-discrimination legislation.
While this may not sound much fun, it actually works in your favour. It means you don't need to spend hours on fancy formatting. You can prioritise getting the words just right, which is exactly what you need to make your CV stand out!
How do you write a student CV with no experience?
As we said above, almost everyone has some experience to put on their CV once they realise that all kinds of experience can count. If you're really struggling to think of anything though, all is not lost.
You'll see from our CV examples for students below that your CV can still shine in other ways. Focus on skills and knowledge you've gained both academically and personally. You can expand on these skills in the Key Skills and Qualifications sections, to give a rounded view of your abilities.
Consider volunteering or taking a weekend or holiday job to bolster the credibility of your CV in the meantime – if you can show that you have some professional skills already, employers will be more willing to give you a chance.
Student CV top tips
-
Write with your reader in mind… that means focusing on what they want to see, not what you want to include
-
Only include grades if they're really impressive – firsts or 2.1s at degree level, As and Bs at A-level, and 7-9s at GCSE
-
Don't list every GCSE if you have a degree – just the total number is fine
-
If you have several different work experiences, only include those relevant to the role you're applying for
-
Follow the instructions on the advert or website every time you apply – different companies have different requirements!
-
Be prepared to tweak and tailor your CV for every application, to ensure it hits the mark every time
Student CV template
Now you know what's expected of a CV for students in the UK, but a template would probably help.
Why not copy this CV template for students and fill it in with your own details?
FIRST NAME, SURNAME
Mobile number, email address, location, LinkedIn URL
PROFILE
Insert 3-4 sentences that show how your skills, experience, and qualifications meet the requirements of the advert you're responding to.
SKILLS
Add a list of 5-10 skills. If you have minimal experience, also add examples of when you've used each skill.
EDUCATION
Level:Subject, InstitutionYear
Level:Subject, InstitutionYear
Level:Subject, InstitutionYear
EXPERIENCE
Job title / Employer name / Dates of employment
Summarise the remit of your role, skills gained, and achievements
Repeat the above for each role
FURTHER DETAILS
Add, for example, IT skills, languages, projects, courses, and anything else that will set you apart.
CV examples for students
Let's now have a look at a couple of real-life student CV examples, to bring together the information above and inspire your own CV.
CV example 1: student looking for a part-time job
The first student CV example is for someone looking for a part-time role to support them through university, having completed their A-levels:
CV example 2: graduating student looking for their first job
The second CV example for students is for someone about to graduate, who is looking for their first step on the career ladder:
Step into your first role with confidence!
Congratulations, you've followed our CV examples for students and written your first CV. You're ready to make your mark on the working world. Hopefully the exercise will have given you the confidence to step forward with pride, safe in the knowledge that you can prove you have what it takes to succeed.
If you'd like a professional to cast their eye over your CV before you unleash it on the world, why not send it for a free, no-obligation review by the experts at TopCV? We'll share some actionable tips and advice so you can give your CV that final polish.