How to write it
You have more experience than you think
The single most common mistake on a first resume is leaving things off because they do not feel like real jobs. A Saturday job in a shop, treasurer of a society, a dissertation, a side project, six months volunteering — all of it is evidence, and a page that omits it in favour of a paragraph about being a hard-working team player is throwing away the only material you have.
The test is not whether something was paid or prestigious. It is whether you can describe what you did and what changed because of it. Two years of retail work with a promotion in it demonstrates reliability, judgement under pressure and the ability to hold a job alongside a degree — which is precisely what an employer is uncertain about when hiring someone with no career history.
- Part-time and holiday work, however unrelated to the field
- Society and club positions, especially anything with a budget or a team
- Your dissertation or final-year project, described as work rather than as a title
- Personal projects — a site you built, a dataset you analysed, a business you tried
- Volunteering, tutoring, coaching, mentoring
- Certificates and online courses you actually finished
Where education goes
At the top, for exactly as long as it is the most impressive thing about you — which usually means until you have around a year of relevant full-time work. Include your expected graduation date rather than leaving it open, because an employer reading a graduate application needs to know when you are available.
Give the degree some substance. A line naming your dissertation topic and three or four relevant modules is worth more than the degree title alone, because it gives an interviewer something to ask about. Include your grade or predicted grade if it is a 2:1 or above, or a GPA of roughly 3.5 or above; leave it off otherwise rather than drawing attention to it.
A-Levels, IB or high school results belong on the page while you are a student and for a year or two after, then come off. Nobody hiring a 28-year-old cares.
Writing bullets when nothing had a revenue number
The advice to quantify everything is correct and it lands badly on a student resume, because most of what you have done did not have a KPI attached. The fix is to widen what counts as a number.
Almost everything has a scale, a frequency, a duration or a comparison hiding in it. How many customers a shift? How large was the budget? How many people were on the committee? How long did the task take before and after you changed it? None of those are business metrics and all of them make a bullet concrete.
"Managed the society's budget" is a responsibility. "Managed a £6,400 annual budget across 11 events and closed £300 under" is the same fact with the scale attached, and it is the version that gets read.
The summary, and what not to put in it
Three sentences: what you are studying and when you finish, the one or two things you have done that are relevant, and what you are looking for. That is all it needs to do.
What it should not contain is adjectives about your character. "Hard-working, passionate and detail-oriented graduate seeking an opportunity to leverage my skills" is the single most common opening on a student resume and it says nothing that could not be said by anyone. Every claim in a summary should be one that would be strange to make if it were not true.
One page, and how to fill it honestly
One page, without exception, at this stage. If you are struggling to fill it, the answer is more detail on what you have done rather than more sections — three bullets on the retail job beats adding an Interests section to take up space.
If you genuinely cannot fill a page, add a project. Building something small and describing it properly is the fastest way to turn a thin resume into a reasonable one, and it is a better use of a weekend than reformatting.