Resume with no work experience: what to write

The first application has a paradox built into it: you need experience to get experience. Sitting in front of an empty document with nothing to put under Berufserfahrung (work experience), it is easy to conclude you have no chance. That is almost always wrong. The material is rarely missing. The translation is.

Nobody expects ten years of career history from a first-time applicant. What employers want to see is that you understand what the role is really about, and that you have carried responsibility somewhere: in an internship, in a club, in your thesis. How a Lebenslauf (the German CV) works in terms of format, length and layout is covered in the complete CV guide. This piece is about the special case where the work experience column is still short and the page has to convince anyway.

01You have more to show than you think

"No experience" almost always means one thing only: no permanent full-time job. Sit down once and write down everything you have done in recent years, unfiltered. Cutting comes later.

• Internships, including short ones. Three weeks of insight beats none.
• Werkstudent roles and side jobs, from tutoring to the checkout till.
• Thesis, project and seminar work, especially with an industry partner or a real data set.
• Your own projects: the website you built for a club, the small online shop, the app from a term project.
• Volunteering: coaching a youth team, student council, first aid service, a committee seat.
• Voluntary service and time abroad: a Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr (the German voluntary social year), au pair work, a semester abroad.

Once that list exists, you almost certainly have enough for a dense page. And you are allowed to rename the section: Praxiserfahrung (practical experience) covers internships, side jobs and projects without promising something the content cannot deliver. Stay close to the conventional wording, though. Creative headings such as "My journey" throw applicant tracking systems off, as the piece on the ATS-proof CV explains in detail.

02Selling internships, side jobs and volunteering

The difference between a pale and a strong entry-level CV is rarely the content. It is the question you ask of every bullet point: what exactly did I do, and what came out of it?

• Pale: "Marketing internship". Strong: "Built the editorial plan for two social media channels and ran it independently for four weeks".
• Pale: "Bachelor thesis on customer satisfaction". Strong: "Designed and analysed a customer survey with around 200 participants and presented the recommendations to the industry partner".
• Pale: "Volunteer youth coach". Strong: "Planned and ran weekly training for a youth team, handled parent communication and tournament entries".

Three habits do most of the work. Start with a verb rather than "Responsible for". Name tools and systems explicitly, so Excel, DATEV, Canva, Shopify instead of "common software". And give each entry two to four bullet points: with few entries, giving each one more room beats padding the list.

If the vocabulary escapes you, the BERUFENET database run by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit (the federal employment agency) lists, for every occupation in Germany, the tasks it involves and the exact German terms for them. That is the vocabulary a recruiter will search for later, so it is worth borrowing.

03Education belongs at the top

Experienced applicants put work experience first and education last. For you it is the other way round, for a simple reason: whatever speaks loudest for you goes at the top, and in the first years after graduating that is your qualification.

An education block listing only institution, dates and grade wastes that space. Treat it as seriously as a job entry:

• focus areas and relevant modules, where they match the role
• the title of your thesis plus one bullet point on the outcome
• semesters abroad, practical semesters, Werkstudent spells inside a company
• your final grade, if it speaks for you or the ad asks for it

The same applies to an Ausbildung: name the training company, the specialisation, the exam focus. If you spent longer in one department, that belongs underneath as a bullet point. Once you have two years of real professional practice, the two blocks swap places again.

04Skills: specific, not buzzwords

"MS Office, team player, motivated" is the standard line in countless entry-level applications, which is exactly why nobody reads it any more. Specific looks like this:

• Name the tools: not "good IT skills" but "Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP), Canva, WordPress, basic Python".
• Be honest about the level: "basic knowledge" is a clean statement. Writing "advanced" and then failing the simplest follow-up question in the interview costs more than the label ever gained.
• Languages by level: the Common European Framework of Reference runs from A1 to C2 and is understood everywhere. A short anchor helps: "German B2, evening course plus daily use at work".
• Prove soft skills instead of claiming them: team player does not belong in the skills list, it belongs in the volunteering bullet where somebody can see it.

Eight entries that hold up beat twenty that read like a wish list. This block is also the fastest thing to adapt to a specific ad: reorder it, pick up two terms from the posting, done.

05What does the structure for a first application look like?

A skeleton that works, top to bottom:

1. Header: name, target role, contact details, photo optional.
2. Profile: three or four lines saying who you are and where you are heading.
3. Education: degree or Ausbildung with focus areas and thesis.
4. Practical experience: internships, Werkstudent roles, projects, each with outcome bullets.
5. Skills and languages: specific and tailored to the ad.
6. Volunteering and interests: where they show character or relevant ability.

Here is a profile that does its job: "Business informatics graduate specialising in data analysis. Practical experience from a Werkstudent role in controlling and a bachelor thesis using a real retail data set. Looking to join a team that backs decisions with numbers." Three sentences, and the person on the other side knows what they are looking at.

And yes, one page is enough. Stretching to two as a beginner dilutes your best points. To see what that looks like for a specific occupation, browse our German-language template catalogue by job: it lists, for each occupation, the entries and terms employers expect.

06Mistakes first-time applicants keep making

Padding the list. Primary school, every holiday job from year nine, three lines of hobbies: filler is obvious to everyone. White space is not a flaw, it is evidence that you chose.

Hiding a real gap. Months sometimes pass between graduating and the first application: orientation, travel, illness, a fruitless job search. That is normal, and it only becomes a problem when you paper over it and get asked about it in the interview. How to name such a phase cleanly is covered in employment gaps.

Layout before legibility. Skill bars, pie charts, icons instead of words: it looks modern on screen and arrives as nothing at all in an applicant tracking system.

Application German. "In the context of my internship I was responsible for supporting the team" describes nothing. Delete the sentence and write what you actually did.

One file for everyone. Precisely because you have few entries, it shows when the order and the skills do not match the ad. Spending a few minutes per application gets you further than sending many identical ones.

Your first CV does not have to prove that you can already do everything. It has to show that you know what you can do and can put it into words. Surprisingly few applications in the pile manage that.