How to write a graduate CV

Education first, then projects, part-time work and societies, each written as evidence of what the employer wants.

A graduate CV has a different job from an experienced one. You probably don’t have a career’s worth of relevant roles, so the CV has to show potential: what you studied, what you built, how you worked with other people, and that you can turn up and get things done. The material is there. It’s mostly a question of order and wording.

Length

One page is the usual target for a graduate CV, and in the US a one-page résumé is the strong convention at this stage. In the UK and much of Europe, two pages is acceptable if you have enough genuine content, but a tight single page is rarely a disadvantage. See CV length by country.

Section order

For most graduates this order works:

1. Contact details (name, phone, email, city, LinkedIn or portfolio link)
2. Summary (optional, two lines)
3. Education
4. Projects (if relevant to the job)
5. Experience (including part-time and summer jobs)
6. Skills
7. Activities or Leadership (societies, sport, volunteering)

If you’ve done a placement year or an internship in the field, it can go above Projects, or even above Education. The principle is the same as for any CV: the most relevant evidence goes first.

Education: more than a line

Education is your main qualification, so give it some detail.

BEng (Hons) Mechanical Engineering, University of Northbridge (2022 to 2025) First Class Honours - Final-year project: designed and tested a low-cost wind tunnel balance; measured lift on 3D-printed aerofoils to within 4% of published reference data. - Relevant modules: Fluid Mechanics (78%), Finite Element Analysis (74%), Engineering Design (81%).

Points to decide:

• Grade. In the UK, give your degree classification (First, 2:1) or your expected one. In the US, GPA is commonly included when it’s strong; many advisers suggest 3.0 or above, though the threshold varies by employer and field. If yours is low, you can leave it out, but some applications will ask for it anyway.
• Modules. List three to five relevant ones, with marks only if they’re good. Don’t list every module.
• Final-year project or dissertation. Treat it as your biggest piece of work, because it usually is. One or two bullets with a result.
• School results. UK graduates often include A-levels (subjects and grades) in a single line. Some graduate schemes set minimum grades, so check. By a few years after graduating, most people drop them.

For more detail, see the education section guide.

Projects

Projects show you doing the work the employer cares about. Course projects, hackathons, personal projects and competition entries all count, as long as you say which is which.

Before: Group project on bridge design.

After: Led a team of 4 designing a 1.2 m truss bridge for the second-year design competition; our design held 85 kg, the highest load-to-weight ratio of 22 teams.

Say what you did personally in group work (“led”, “built the load tests”, “wrote the report”). An employer can’t hire your team. See the projects section guide.

Part-time jobs count

Bar work, retail, tutoring, delivery driving, call centres: these show reliability, customer contact, working under pressure and handling money. Don’t list them as an afterthought; write them properly, with one or two bullets each.

Before: Waitress at a café. Served customers and cleaned tables.

After: Trained 3 new staff and covered shift supervision at weekends in a café serving about 300 customers a day; worked 15 to 20 hours a week alongside full-time study.

“Alongside full-time study” is worth saying. Working while studying shows time management without you having to claim it.

If you’ve had many short jobs, group them: “Part-time work, 2021 to 2025: retail assistant, Northbridge Books; tutor, self-employed; event steward, City Arena.” Then add one or two bullets for the most useful parts.

Societies, sport and volunteering

These count most when you had a role or did something measurable. Membership alone says little.

Put these under a heading such as Activities, Leadership or Volunteering. Keep the heading plain so an applicant tracking system can read it (see ATS explained).

Skills

List skills you could use on day one, grouped:

• Technical: SolidWorks, MATLAB, Python (pandas, NumPy), ANSYS
• Lab and workshop: strain gauges, CNC milling (supervised), wind tunnel testing
• Languages: French (B2)

Avoid self-ratings like five-star bars; they can’t be checked and an ATS can’t read them. For languages, the CEFR levels (A1 to C2) are widely understood in Europe. See the skills section guide.

A short summary (optional)

A graduate summary is optional. If you write one, make it specific and keep it to two lines:

Before: Highly motivated recent graduate seeking an opportunity to develop my skills in a dynamic company.

After: Mechanical engineering graduate (First, 2025) with hands-on wind tunnel and CAD experience, looking for a graduate role in aerospace or energy test engineering.

If you can’t make it that specific, leave it out and let Education lead.

Common graduate mistakes

• “Responsible for” and “helped with”. Say what you did. The builder flags these phrases.
• A list of duties instead of results. Even small results count: “cut stock-count time from 3 hours to 2 by reorganising the stockroom”.
• Personal details you don’t need. In the UK and US, leave out date of birth, nationality (unless right to work is relevant), marital status and a photo. See personal details.
• The same CV for every application. Graduate schemes differ. Reorder bullets and projects for each one. See tailoring your CV.
• An unprofessional email address. Create a plain one with your name.

Open the graduate engineer example to see this structure as a full one-page CV, then replace the content with your own.