Cover letter with no experience: 4 full examples

Read the word "experience" in a job listing as "evidence that you can do this". Paid work is the usual place to get that evidence, which is why listings use the word. It is not the only place.

Before you write anything, make a list of everything you have done that took effort, involved other people or produced something. Look in seven places.

• Coursework. A dissertation, a lab report, a long essay, a presentation. What was the question, and what mark did it get?
• Projects. Anything you made, alone or in a group: an app, a bench, a short film, a business plan. What was your part?
• Societies, teams and clubs. Any role with a duty attached: treasurer, captain, the person who booked the minibus. How many people, how much money, how often?
• Volunteering. A charity shop, a food bank, a youth group, a sports club. What do you do each time you turn up, and how long have you been turning up?
• Part-time, seasonal and casual work. Shop shifts, bar work, babysitting, farm work in the summer. It is work, and it goes in.
• Caring and running a home. Looking after a parent, a child or a sibling, and the appointments, medication and paperwork that come with it.
• Things you taught yourself. A language, a programming language, video editing, fixing bikes. What did you make with it?

Aim for ten items. You will use two or three in any one letter, but different listings ask for different things and you need a list to choose from.

An item from your list becomes evidence when it answers three questions.

1. What exactly did you do? One or two actions, with you as the subject of the sentence.
2. How much, how many or how often? People, hours, weeks, pounds, pages, marks.
3. What came of it? A grade, a result, or a thing that other people now use.

Here is that method applied to three kinds of experience. In each pair the weak line names a quality and the strong line shows it.

Coursework

Part-time work

Something you taught yourself

The same rewrite works on almost anything.

Three rules keep these honest. Start with a verb. Count something. Keep the real name of the thing: a babysitter is a babysitter and a Saturday job is a Saturday job. The detail does the persuading, and an inflated title is an easy thing to be asked about at interview.

Do not send your three best items to every employer. Send the three this employer asked for. Where a listing asks for qualities (reliable, organised, good with people), answer each one with an example, because a quality cannot be shown any other way.

Pick the three lines of the listing you can answer best and give each one an item from your list. If the listing also says "one year's experience preferred", leave that line alone. "Preferred" and "ideally" mark what an employer would like to have, and you answer them by answering everything else well. The first step of How to write a cover letter has a fuller method for reading a listing.

The reader has your resume and can see what is on it. The letter is the place for what you have done, and a sentence about a gap does nothing except point at it.

Go through your draft and delete these wherever they appear:

• "Although I lack...", "Despite having no...", "While I may not have..."
• "I know I am not the most experienced candidate"
• "I am only a student" and "I am just a school leaver"
• "If you give me a chance" and "I hope to prove myself"
• "This role would be a great opportunity for me to learn"

The last one is about what the job would do for you. Wanting to learn is worth one clause at most, after the evidence: "and I would like to learn how it is done for a whole county".

The opposite mistake is to fill the gap with something that did not happen: a week of work experience stretched into a job, a group mark claimed as your own, a number rounded up. State exactly what you did. If it is small, say it plainly and give it a detail.

The usual advice is to open with your strongest relevant result, and it still holds. Yours comes from somewhere other than a job. Four openings work.

• Something you made or finished. A project, a piece of coursework, an event. Lead with the thing itself and one number.
• A figure from a society, a team or a part-time job. Members, money, customers, weeks.
• A connection to the employer. You are a customer, you did a placement there, you live round the corner. Say so, then go straight to evidence.
• A referral. A lecturer, a teacher or someone who works there, named with their permission.

Do not open with your name, your age, the date you graduate, a quotation or a definition. Any of them can wait or be left out. There are forty more first lines, sorted by what each one proves, in How to start a cover letter.

End with two practical things: what you can show, and when you are free.

• Something to look at. Photos of what you built, a link to the site, a one-page summary of the dissertation.
• Someone to ask. A teacher, a lecturer, the manager of your Saturday job or the person who runs the volunteers, if they have agreed to act as a referee.
• Dates. When your exams or your course finish, which days you are free, and when you can start.
• A demonstration. For practical work, say you would be glad to show the skill in person: a test piece in the workshop, or a paid trial shift.

Sign off with "Yours sincerely," or "Kind regards," and your full name. There are more closing paragraphs in How to end a cover letter.

Each letter below is for a different person in a different situation, and each is written in a different tone. None of the four writers has held a job in the field they are applying to, and none of the letters says so.

Priya Nair finished a geography degree in July and is applying to Ashby Wren, a small transport consultancy. The listing asks for someone who can take a questionnaire from first draft to findings and write clearly for readers who are not specialists.

Oisín Brennan left school in June and is applying to a joinery workshop in the west of Ireland. The advert is four lines long. It asks for someone who is good with their hands, measures accurately and turns up.

Marisol Reyes is 41. She spent six years looking after her father at home, and she coordinates the volunteer drivers at a seniors' centre. She is applying to Birchline, a home care agency in Nova Scotia, which needs someone to keep visits covered when plans change.

Bao Nguyen is a business student in Melbourne with a weekend café job. He is applying to Loomstead Studio, a small architecture practice, which wants someone to manage supplies, know where everything is and work Wednesday to Friday.

The tone differs from letter to letter and the method does not.

Replace everything in square brackets. The frame has no line for explaining what you have not done, and you should not add one.

[Your name]
[Phone] | [Email] | [Town or city]

[Date]

Dear [Mr/Ms Surname or Hiring Manager],

[The most relevant thing you have done, from a course, a project, a society, volunteering, part-time work or home, with one number.] [The role you are applying for, and what that thing has to do with it.]

[Requirement 1, in the listing's own words.] [What you did that answers it: where, what exactly, how much or how often.] [What came of it: a mark, a result, or something people still use.]

[Requirement 2 from the listing.] [A second piece of evidence, from a different part of your life.] [What came of it.]

[One specific thing about this employer: something they made, did or said in the listing.] [What it has to do with you.]

[What you can show or talk through at interview.] [When you can meet, and when you can start.]

Yours sincerely,
[Your name]

If you are applying for a placement during your degree, Internship cover letters has three letters built on coursework, group projects, societies and weekend jobs. If you have years of work behind you in another field, you are changing career, and Career change cover letters is the better guide.

• Count the evidence. Each body paragraph should hold at least one number or one named thing.
• Check it against your resume. Dates, marks and figures must match. If the letter mentions something the resume leaves out, add it to the resume.
• Keep it short. How to write a cover letter gives 250 to 400 words for a standard letter. A first letter has less history to choose from, so 200 to 300 is enough, and padding to reach 250 only adds sentences without evidence. How long should a cover letter be? shows the same letter at three lengths.
• If AI wrote the draft, check every fact in it. Remove anything you did not do, and add one detail only you would know. How to make an AI cover letter sound like you sets out a ten-minute pass.