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College Graduate
Best for senior and mid-level candidates
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Build my resume Whether you attended a traditional 4-year university straight out of high school or worked through an online program, there’s no doubt your college experience was unique.
Hence, it’s safe to assume that your college graduate resume will also be unique, which is good because you want an employer to see what makes you a valuable candidate. That said, it can be difficult to outline your resume or work with an AI cover letter generator if your work experience is sparse or irrelevant.
That’s why we’ve taken the time to build 13 college graduate resume samples you can use as a springboard. With our examples and proven tips, we know you’ll be able to expertly draft a professional resume that encompasses your collegiate activities, work history, and skills.
Why this resume works
- If college graduation happened in the not-so-distant past, you likely have work experience you can include in your recent college graduate resume. While it’s great if you can include work similar to your chosen field, don’t panic if this isn’t your experience. Employers recognize that we all start somewhere, so here are some ways to ensure you demonstrate competency for the job:
- Include relevant coursework,
- Include a specific and honest list of skills,
- Include your GPA (if you’re proud of it!),
- and include a resume objective.
- When writing bullet points for both your job and project descriptions, do your best to demonstrate how you took action.
- Use numbers when possible to show measurable impact.
- Start with action verbs.
- Be specific, and avoid generalized statements that could be on any resume.
View more recent college graduate resumes >
Why this resume works
- Not everyone works through college, and that’s perfectly okay. While a resume usually delineates work history, this is your opportunity to concentrate on projects and activities you’ve been involved in during college.
- Place emphasis on projects relevant to your chosen field. List 2-4 bullet points about your contributions, responsibilities, and accomplishments. Don’t forget to start with a strong action verb.
- It’s also appropriate to include other extracurriculars on your college graduate resume. Seemingly irrelevant activities are important to include because they demonstrate you’re a well-rounded candidate.
- Take advantage of the career objective by briefly summing up your varied collegiate projects, and be sure to state how your experience better equips you for the job.
- If you’re lacking typical work experience, avoid throwing a haphazard list of skills on your resume.
- Examine the description of your desired job, and include some of those mentioned skills that are relevant to you.
Why this resume works
- Being a graduate doesn’t equate to absolutely zero hands-on nursing experience. Yes, you’re eager to start a fulfilling career with your dream company, but what the prospective employer is really looking for in your new graduate nurse resume is your capacity to effect change in the real world.
- An excellent approach here would be to describe your involvement in volunteer programs, like Leo’s stints at Beyond the Bedside and Health Habits, Healthy Lives. Go the extra mile to illuminate the tangible difference your intervention facilitated.
Why this resume works
- Let’s cut to the chase. You’re on the hunt for an internship and wondering how to stand out in this sea of applicants?” And the answer? It’s simple—tap into the power of a well-written objective statement.
- In just three sentences, just below your new college graduate resume’s header, spill the tea on what drives you toward this internship, then spice it up with a dash of your awesome personality. And about flexing some of your skills and gigs? Sure, there’s no harm in that.
Why this resume works
- Curious about perfectly tailoring your computer science graduate resume to a junior software engineer role? While you don’t have as much professional experience compared to seasoned candidates, equally potent are industry-relevant workshops and volunteer programs you participated in.
- For each, it’s essential to highlight your application or mastery of skills or tools fundamental to computer science or software engineering (Think Python, Java, PostgreSQL, and C++).
Why this resume works
- Fresh out of college and ready to revolutionize the tech world? Let the career objective of your college graduate IT resume reflect that same passion. Skip the lip service and focus on specifics.
- Begin with your past achievements, even if it’s only a web development internship. Employers will be much more lenient since you’re only a recent grad. Next, mention your best skills and how you aim to use them to develop banger IT solutions for your to-be company.
Why this resume works
- How about beefing up your college graduate graphic design resume to lead your narrative with purpose and personality? Welcome to the art of whipping up a compelling career objective.
- In just 2-3 sentences at the top, call out your go-to design tools (think software like Bender, Figma, and Adobe Photoshop) and relevant college projects—perhaps a graphic design competition or when you helped a local brand find its visual voice. Then, wrap it up with a quick line about the kind of creative spark or design impact you’re excited to bring to the role.
Why this resume works
- Want to shoot miles ahead of all other applicants? Using quantified metrics, show potential employers you’ve worked harder than the average graduate.
- Regardless of what field you’re in, quantify your work’s impact. For instance, look at Aria’s post college graduate resume and how she doesn’t just add skills, but mentions results like “increased design accuracy by 16%” to show hiring managers that her impact is measurable and that she’s ready to grow her career as solidly as a well-constructed bridge.
Why this resume works
- Choosing a one-column layout for your criminal justice college graduate resume is a solid start, but let’s kick it further. Why not show off your hands-on experience with relevant software, whether case management tools, data entry platforms, or anything in between, to prove you’re ready to hit the ground running?
- If the job listing mentions tools like Odyssey Case Manager, Spillman Flex CAD, and Mark43 RMS, don’t just name-drop. Demonstrate the impact. Did you match call length with reported stress levels to flag escalation risks? Or did you prioritize urgent calls? Connect each tool to the results you achieved, and you’ll stand out.
Why this resume works
- What you lack in accounting experience can be leveraged with your practical projects on staff audit assurance and business cost reduction. Showing the most relevant outcomes from your experiments would be favored by a lot of recruiters.
- It’s a masterstroke for your accounting college graduate resume to highlight your analytical, cost-cutting, process automation, and risk mitigation through experimental projects that can be actualized in the real business world.
Why this resume works
- Your engineering college graduate resume should showcase your abilities as well as your creativity—regardless of whether you have job experience.
- Something you “just did for fun” may actually be a project worth mentioning. If you developed an app for personal use and preference, this is an excellent project to include that will detail your skills, project outcome, and creativity.
- If you don’t have work experience to include on your resume, place heavier emphasis on your education by listing:
- awards, achievements, recognition, or organizations/societies you were involved in;
- solid GPAs;
- and relevant coursework.
- Including a resume objective will also go a long way in demonstrating your offerings and career goals.
- Make sure you change your resume objective for each job you apply to. Otherwise, it’s better to not include one.
Why this resume works
- While every resume ought to be eye-catching, your human resources college graduate resume must outshine them all. Since your responsibilities will include hiring employees, it’s imperative that your own resume and career documents are top-notch.
- Choose a professional but creative template, and take advantage of our free resume checker that will help you with a number of things, including using active verbs, avoiding passive voice, and checking for punctuation consistency.
- Include internships, work experience, and any projects that will attest to your abilities to manage employees and streamline operations.
- No matter what you include in your resume, write job description bullet points that will demonstrate genuine care for the people you work with as well as your ability to assist and improve the experiences of those individuals.
- Hint: If you can quantify your experiences with figures, statistics, percentages, or money, do so—metrics speak louder than vague statements.
Why this resume works
- As a college student who didn’t graduate, it’s easy to fall short of confidence. But hold your head up high—a project showing off your results-driven mindset and other handy skills could be your moment in the spotlight.
- Perhaps, think about that time you transformed an online page into a hit with your SEO mastery as a business owner or those custom logos and promo videos you whipped up during a graphic designer stint. Point them out in your if you went to college but didn’t graduate resume, and no ifs or buts about it. And those volunteer gigs? Throw them in to showcase the teamwork and community engagement side of you.
Why this resume works
- Internships are extremely valuable to your marketing college graduate resume. Not everyone secures an internship before entering the workforce, so including an internship will demonstrate initiative, real-world experience, and industry knowledge.
- In a field such as marketing, don’t gloss over the projects you’ve taken on throughout college.
- Whether you’ve improved traffic to your personal blog or volunteered to build campaigns for a local organization, those undertakings matter a great deal because employers will, again, see your initiative as well as how you operate in your skillset when you’re not on the clock.
- Trying to fit all the pieces of your college years onto one page is a challenge, so choose a template that will allow you to rearrange and organize sections in a logical way.
Why this resume works
- Your lack of clinical experience should not dim your hopes for landing an entry-level nursing job. Your volunteer patient care experience is an excellent angle to pursue and show your capabilities to potential employers.
- All you have to do in your nursing college graduate resume is to underline your accomplishments in patient care, saving waiting times, and improving overall outcomes.
Related resume guides
How to Write a College Graduate Resume
Considering that you’re a new graduate looking to break into working life, it may not be easy to write a resume that impresses recruiters. However, if you plan everything carefully and follow the tips in this guide, you may land your first job fast.
So, what should a college graduate resume include? We’ll cover everything you need to know in this section:
Craft an attention-grabbing header
Make your contact information stand out because it’s the first thing recruiters will see. Create a resume header section to make it easy for hiring teams and applicant tracking systems (ATS) to find it. Ensure you use a professional and relatively bigger font than the rest of the other sections.
Here’s what you should include
- First and last name
- Job title you’re applying for
- Professional email with your first and last name
- Current phone number
- City and state
- LinkedIn profile, if relevant to the job
Go over the details one more time and ensure that everything is correct. Potential employers will need this information to contact you if they consider you a perfect fit for the role.
Example of a stand out college graduate resume header
Add a compelling career objective
Give potential employers something that makes you unique, and they will consider you for the open position. Use the career objective to summarize your ambitions, academic experience, and how you’re fit for the role.
Example of a college graduate resume objective
Motivated computer science graduate eager to contribute to Google’s engineering team by building scalable, user-focused solutions and growing through impactful, real-world experience.
Showcase your educational background
Your educational background is essential for a new graduate resume to help recruiters see the practical knowledge you would bring once hired. To make this section convincing, include the following:
- Name of your college or university
- City and state
- Month and year of your graduation
- Your degree major and minor
- Include GPA only if 3.5 and above
Since you lack direct work experience, like many other recent graduates, you must add all the relevant educational details. Choosing the right college graduate resume template will allow you enough room to add all the details that matter.
Your coursework would also be a good addition to show employers your solid foundation in the particular industry and demonstrate your alignment with job expectations.
Example of an education section for a college graduate’s resume
Highlight your experience with relevant skills
You’re a recent graduate, and nobody expects you to have much direct work experience in the industry you want to work in. In that case, turn to your internships, academic projects, and volunteer activities to show employers what you can do. As you do so, generate bullet points highlighting the skills you gained that can be useful in a real work setting.
For anything that is not direct work experience, only include examples directly related to the position you’re applying for.
Examples of relevant experiences for a college graduate
- Practical projects
- Internships
- Charity work
- Part-time jobs
- Course work
- Relevant extracurriculars
Example of how to write your college graduate work experience
Demonstrate a diverse skillset
Just because you’ve not held a real job in your profession doesn’t mean you have no skills to show. In fact, from your academic activities as an intern or undertaking a practical lesson, you have so much more to show and prove that you’re ready to make an impact in the job market with a set of relevant and transferrable skills as below:
Hard skills
- Google Workspace
- GitHub
- TCP/IP
- JavaScript
- Python
- SQL
- Excel
Soft skills
- Critical thinking and problem-solving
- Interpersonal and communication skills
- Teamwork
- Time management
- Ease of adaptation
A combination of technical and soft skills informs recruiters of your ability to excel and observe all the industry standards. Even without work experience, you’ll make a strong case by demonstrating what you can do.
Don’t just stop at listing the skills; incorporate them into your job descriptions. Also, use active verbs to start your bullet points and show the impact you made in previous roles.
Use the right template for your college graduate resume
From our resume templates, find one that presents you as the best candidate for the job. You need a layout that gives prominence to essential sections, is easy to edit and read, and is suitable for a recent college graduate. Most importantly, your resume design must be ats-friendly and one that will stand out to recruiters.
College Graduate Resume FAQs
It’s an entry-level resume you write to showcase your education, transferrable skills, and relevant work experience to convince potential employers of your potential to make an impact. Since you lack direct work experience as a recent graduate, you would want to add a strong education section and relevant experiences from projects and internships.
Yes. A strong college graduate resume will compensate for your lack of experience and pitch your strengths to recruiters. Showcasing your abilities through skills and achievements from relevant roles would make your application convincing.
Yes. Having a resume as a college graduate helps you pitch your transferrable skills to employers and convince them of your abilities. It also showcases your strengths for a specific industry, even when you have little to no work experience.
Choose a resume template and start editing now. Fill in the essential details, including information to help employers see why they should hire you. An editable template gives a head start and ensures you get it right.
We recommend you use the reverse-chronological resume format. Why? If you treat academic and personal projects, volunteer work, and school extracurriculars as valid experience (which you should), you won’t be stumped as to what to put in your “work experience” section on your resume. Employers and recruiters are most familiar with the reverse-chronological format anyway, and you won’t raise red flags with a resume based primarily on skills.
Consider including your GPA if it’s greater than 3.5 as it can demonstrate your strong work ethic, commitment, and perseverance, all while working through multiple projects and tasks. Once you’ve gained several years of work experience, it’s a good idea to remove your GPA as your work experience will stand out above grades from the past.
Your resume should be one page long. It must be brief and without any fluff. Include only the most critical details and tailor them to the job.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
