
It’s no silver bullet you’re not going to quit your job driving a forklift today and set up shop freelancing tomorrow hoping to learn everything as you go. The barriers to entry are lower, and you can do some learning on the job. You can mitigate some of this by starting your career with freelancing. Why would they even give you a second look? Meanwhile, they have a stack of résumés, many demonstrating the skills they need. You’re asking them to hire you even though you have no experience solving the problem they need solved. They have a problem they need to solve or else they wouldn’t be hiring. Think about this from the company’s perspective. It’s easy to get cynical and start poking fun at the fact that entry-level positions require 5 years of experience, but that won’t help you get hired. (You might be interested in reading about the best types of projects for learning and even getting some inspiration from my list of 10 sometimes wacky project ideas.)

Instead, go build a project or two that gets you some experience in the area of interest and list those on your next application for a similar opening. You can apply for this job anyway, but you’re unlikely to get it. If your problem is, in fact, that you have zero experience that’s relevant for this job, you probably need to fix that instead of applying.
No experience on resume code#
Provide links to code and working deployments of the projects if that’s practical. Instead of listing irrelevant work experience, list projects you’ve completed that are relevant.
No experience on resume professional#
If your problem is that you don’t have professional experience, that’s fine. Do you mean that you have no experience whatsoever that is relevant to the job you’re applying for, or do you mean that you don’t have professional experience (meaning you haven’t been paid for this kind of work)? I wish I had used the bullet points to point out specific projects that would have been interesting to them. As it’s written, my freelancing practice is a sort of black box where I did “front-end development,” whatever that means. One thing I might have done better is to break out individual projects I’ve done through RadWorks. They don’t care that I served time as a Walmart cashier or that I was paid to produce IDs for students at my high school. Instead, I included only what was relevant for the position I was applying for. I could have tried to catalog everything I’ve ever done in the “Experience” section.

I’ve been working since I was about 15 years old. My goal is to communicate why I would be valuable without wasting people’s time. I could have written several paragraphs of flowery prose about my career objectives, but that wouldn’t have made this any better. If you think from the perspective of the company who is trying to filter through 100-200 of these, this is exactly what you’d want to see. You can quickly see what tech I know, where I’ve worked, and what projects I’ve worked on. My example résumé is a single page and glanceable. Let’s go through and examine the aspects of this particular resume that succeeded and those that could be improved. I show this not as an example of the perfect résumé - it definitely isn’t - but as an example of one that worked. I didn’t get the job, but the résumé certainly did its job by getting me into the building. 😜 On that day, I sent out one résumé, and I ended up doing four rounds of interviews with the company. Well, I thought that for a day, at least.
No experience on resume how to#
Keep reading, and I’ll teach you how to write a résumé that gets through the filter and takes you one step closer to gainful employment.Īfter I decided to leave my last full-time gig, I thought I wanted to go directly into another one.

The only thing you want from your résumé is to get you through that initial filter so you can start getting interviews. Most applicants get filtered out before they get a single interview. Companies filter through tons of résumés for each opening. How to Build Your Web Developer Résumé (Even with No Experience)Įven in a field like web development where you have loads of opportunities (see Why Web Development Is a Great Career), competition for permanent positions is still fierce.
