What to Put on a CV With No Work Experience
Every job seems to ask for experience, and you can't get experience without a job. It's a real problem, but it's not as absolute as it feels. Employers hiring for entry-level roles know you haven't worked yet — what they're looking for is evidence that you're capable, reliable and worth training. You almost certainly have that evidence already; it just isn't on your CV yet.
Change the order: education goes first
When you have no work history, education is your strongest section, so move it to the top, straight under your summary.
Don't just write the degree name. Add the details that show substance: relevant courses, your final-year project or thesis topic, your grade if it was good, and any academic responsibility you held.
Volunteering counts as experience — list it properly
This is the section most first-time applicants leave out, and it's often the most persuasive one. Community work, mosque or madrasa teaching, helping at an IDP camp, awareness campaigns, university clubs, election observation, sports coaching — all of it is real work.
Write it exactly the way you'd write a paid job: role, organization, dates, and two bullets showing what you achieved.
Example: "Volunteer Teacher, Al-Hikma Learning Centre, Mogadishu, Jan–Aug 2025. Taught basic English to 30 students weekly; developed a beginner curriculum still used by the centre."
Include internships, attachments and family business work
A three-month unpaid internship is experience. So is running the accounts for your family's shop, managing their inventory, or handling their customers.
Many Somali graduates dismiss family business work as not counting. It absolutely does — it demonstrates responsibility, numeracy and customer handling. Describe it professionally: "Managed daily sales records and supplier payments for a retail business with 40+ daily customers."
Build a skills section that's specific
Skills are where you can compete directly with more experienced candidates, because software ability isn't gated behind employment.
- Software: Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Google Workspace, QuickBooks.
- Data: KoBo Toolbox, ODK, basic data entry and analysis.
- Technical: social media management, graphic design, basic accounting, report writing.
- Languages: Somali, English, Arabic — with honest levels.
Add free certificates — they genuinely help
Short online courses are one of the fastest ways to strengthen a thin CV, and many are free. Certificates in project management, humanitarian principles, monitoring and evaluation, Excel, or English all signal initiative.
DisasterReady, Coursera, and the Kaya humanitarian learning platform all offer relevant free courses with certificates. Two or three of these can meaningfully change how an entry-level CV reads.
Write a summary that leads with attitude, not experience
Since you can't lead with years of experience, lead with your qualification, your specific skills and your direction.
Example: "Recent Business Administration graduate from SIMAD University with strong Excel and bookkeeping skills, and eight months of volunteer experience supporting community programmes in Banadir. Seeking an entry-level finance or administration role with an NGO."
Keep it to one page and apply anyway
With no formal employment, one page is right. A padded two-page CV makes the gap more obvious, not less.
One last thing: apply even when the advert asks for one or two years of experience. Those numbers are usually a preference rather than a hard rule, and organizations regularly hire strong candidates who fall slightly short. The application you don't send is the only one guaranteed to fail.