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 if your work experience is sparse or irrelevant.
That’s why we’ve taken the time to build 5 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
- 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
- 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.
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 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.
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College Graduate Resume FAQs
While you may have work experience to add to your resume, not everyone does—and that’s perfectly okay! Your college career is ripe with experiences to include in your resume. Most importantly, you need to fill in the “work experience” section of your resume, and if you don’t have traditional work experience yet, use this space to talk about academic projects or student organizations you were involved in or even led. Academic projects and student orgs that are relevant to your degree are excellent talking points since they’ll directly provide valuable experience for your career choice. Other things worth including are relevant coursework and a career objective that specifically shares how your experience to date will help you contribute to the job.
Some will tell you to use a functional resume format, which places emphasis on your skills and minimizes your work history. While you can use a functional format, we’re gonna throw a curve ball and recommend you use the reverse-chronological resume format instead. 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.
If you’re proud of it! Listing your GPA on your college grad resume is not a requirement for most employers, but it certainly can’t hurt your case if you’ve got a GPA worth sharing with the world. 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.
