How to Write a CV With No Experience (Saudi Graduate Guide)

You have a degree, no employment history, and a CV that fits in four lines. The problem is not that you have nothing to say. It is that the things you have done — cooperative training, a graduation project, a volunteer role, a Doroob course — are sitting in your head as facts instead of on the page as achievements.

A credible fresh-graduate CV in the Saudi market is one page, has an Experience section that is not empty, and gives a reviewer three concrete things they can ask you about. This guide shows what goes in each section, with a full before-and-after rewrite of a real-shaped empty CV.

Quick answer

• Fill the Experience section with cooperative training (التدريب التعاوني), Tamheer, internships, volunteer roles and freelance work — all of it counts.
• Give the graduation project its own section with four bullets: problem, your role, tools, result.
• One page. Not two.
• Courses go last, filtered. Three relevant Doroob or Coursera certificates, not fifteen.
• Every line starts with a verb and ends with a number or an output. “Built”, “surveyed”, “trained”, “reduced”, “delivered”.

If you also need to decide which openings to chase, read our fresh graduate jobs in Saudi Arabia guide alongside this one, and the Saudi CV guide for the document rules that apply to every career stage.

What counts as experience when you have never had a salary

Employers screening graduates are not looking for years. They are looking for evidence that you have worked inside a real constraint — a deadline, a supervisor, a customer, a budget. Anything that gave you that constraint belongs in your Experience section.

What you did	Where it goes	Why it counts
التدريب التعاوني (cooperative training)	Experience	Structured, supervised, dated, at a named employer
Tamheer placement	Experience	On-the-job training at a real entity, with a supervisor
Summer internship	Experience	Same logic, shorter
Volunteer work (Ehsan, a charity, a university initiative)	Experience or Volunteering	Real responsibility, real people depending on you
Student club or committee role	Experience or Activities	Budget, events, teams — treat it like a job
Freelance work (design, translation, tutoring, content)	Experience	Clients and deliverables are the strongest evidence there is
Helping in a family business	Experience	Absolutely counts. Give it a title and dates
Graduation project	Its own Projects section	Your longest and deepest piece of work
University course projects with real outputs	Projects	Only if there is a working output, not just a grade
Doroob / Coursera / Google certificates	Courses & Certifications	Proof of initiative, filtered for relevance

Definition worth being precise about. التدريب التعاوني (cooperative training) is a supervised, credit-bearing training period at an employer, usually a full semester in the final year of a Saudi degree. Tamheer is a separate post-graduation on-the-job training programme for Saudi graduates administered through the Human Resources Development Fund and the Taqat platform, with a monthly allowance and a fixed duration. They are not the same thing and you can list both. Check current eligibility rules and the allowance on the official HRDF platform, since programme terms are updated periodically.

The one-page structure that works

In order, top to bottom:

1. Header — name, city, phone, email, LinkedIn URL. Nothing else. No date of birth, no marital status, no photo.
2. Professional summary — two lines. Specialty, strongest proof, direction.
3. Experience — cooperative training, Tamheer, internships, volunteering, freelance. Reverse chronological.
4. Projects — graduation project first, then one or two more.
5. Education — degree, university, graduation year, GPA if it is strong.
6. Skills — tools and technologies, plain list, no star ratings or progress bars.
7. Courses & Certifications — filtered to the role.

If Education is your single strongest asset — a top GPA, a well-known program — move it above Experience. Otherwise Experience goes first, even when it is training rather than employment.

Writing cooperative training so it reads like a job

This is where most graduate CVs collapse. They describe what the department did, or what the student observed.

Weak: “Cooperative training at a construction company. Learned about project management and site operations and attended meetings with the team.”

Strong: “Cooperative Training – Site Engineering | [Contracting Company], Riyadh | 02/2025 – 06/2025

• Surveyed and documented 34 site inspection reports across 3 active villa projects, standardising the format the supervising engineer now uses.
• Rebuilt the weekly materials request sheet in Excel, cutting the site manager’s compilation time from about 2 hours to 20 minutes.
• Presented a 12-slide handover summary to the project manager at the end of the placement.”

The strong version contains numbers a supervisor could confirm, a named employer, and three things you produced rather than watched. Nothing in it is inflated — it is the same four months, written honestly and specifically.

Two rules make the difference:

• Start with a verb of production: surveyed, built, rebuilt, documented, trained, translated, tested, presented. Never “was responsible for”, never “learned about”.
• Attach a countable object: 34 reports, 3 projects, 12 slides, 2 hours to 20 minutes. If you did not count it at the time, estimate honestly and use a rounded figure you can defend in the interview.

The graduation project section

Your graduation project is often the most substantial work you have ever done, and it is usually reduced to one line. Give it four bullets.

Weak: “Graduation project: a mobile application for booking medical appointments. Grade: Excellent.”

Strong: “Clinic appointment booking app — Graduation project, 2 students, 5 months

• Problem: patients at a small Riyadh clinic booked by phone, and about a third of slots went unfilled after cancellations.
• My role: built the Flutter front end and the booking logic; my partner handled the backend.
• Tools: Flutter, Firebase, Figma.
• Result: working app tested with 40 sample bookings; the clinic used it for a two-week trial. Graded Excellent.”

Note the structure: problem, your role, tools, result. The “my role” line matters more than students expect — a two-person project where you claim everything reads as either dishonest or vague, and an interviewer will probe it in thirty seconds.

Skills: what to list and what to cut

List what you can be tested on. A skills section is a list of interview questions you are inviting.

• Keep: named tools and technologies (Python, Excel, Power BI, AutoCAD, SAP, Figma, Revit), languages with an honest level, and specific methods you actually applied.
• Cut: “team player”, “hard worker”, “fast learner”, “communication skills”. These occupy the same space on every CV in the pile and therefore distinguish nobody.
• Cut: star ratings, percentage bars and skill meters. They break ATS parsing and they invite the question “why is your Excel 4 out of 5 and not 5?”
• Be honest about English. Writing “Fluent English” on the CV invites an English interview. If yours is good but not fluent, write “English: professional working level”.

Courses and certificates: three, not fifteen

Doroob (دروب) certificates, Coursera courses, Google certificates and Microsoft badges all belong on a fresh graduate CV — they are cheap-to-fake individually but they show initiative, and Saudi employers know the Doroob platform. The mistake is listing everything.

Keep the three or four that point at the job you are applying for, with the platform name and the year. A data analyst applicant lists the Excel, SQL and data visualisation courses and drops the entrepreneurship and time-management ones. A sales applicant does the reverse. The rest can live on your LinkedIn profile, where there is no space constraint.

Before and after: a whole CV

Before — this is roughly what an empty graduate CV looks like:

Ahmed Alotaibi Objective: Seeking a challenging position in a reputable organization where I can utilize my skills and develop my career. Education: Bachelor of Business Administration, King Saud University, 2026. GPA 4.1/5. Experience: Cooperative training at a bank, 4 months. Skills: Microsoft Office, teamwork, communication, hard worker, fast learner. Courses: 11 Doroob certificates.

After — same person, same facts, one page:

Ahmed Alotaibi — Riyadh | 05x-xxx-xxxx | ahmed.alotaibi@email.com | linkedin.com/in/…

Summary: Business administration graduate (KSU, 2026) with retail-banking operations training. Built the branch’s daily reconciliation tracker during cooperative training; comfortable in Excel, Power BI and Arabic/English client correspondence.

Experience Cooperative Training – Branch Operations | [Bank Name], Riyadh | 01/2026 – 05/2026

• Reconciled daily branch transactions alongside the operations officer, processing 60-80 entries per day.
• Built an Excel tracker that replaced a manual paper log, cutting end-of-day reconciliation from about 45 to 15 minutes.
• Handled walk-in customer document checks in Arabic and English during peak hours.

Volunteer Coordinator | University Career Week, KSU | 10/2025 – 11/2025

• Coordinated 18 student volunteers across 3 days and 12 employer booths.
• Managed the visitor registration sheet for 400+ attendees.

Projects Retail branch queue study — Senior course project, 3 students, 8 weeks. Timed 120 customer visits, identified the two steps causing most of the wait, proposed a counter reallocation. Graded Excellent.

Education Bachelor of Business Administration, King Saud University, 2026. GPA 4.1/5.

Skills: Excel (pivot tables, lookups), Power BI, SAP basics, Arabic (native), English (professional working level).

Courses: Financial Analysis Fundamentals — Doroob, 2025. Excel for Business — Coursera, 2025. Anti-Money Laundering Basics — Doroob, 2026.

Nothing was invented. The same four months of cooperative training went from one line to three defensible bullets, the volunteer week became a coordination role, and the course project became a project entry. That is the whole trick.

What Jadarat and screening systems actually read

Postings routed through جدارات and most corporate portals extract structured fields: job titles, employer names, dates, degree, university, and a keyword profile from the body text. That has three practical consequences for you:

• Give every entry a title, an employer and dates. “Cooperative training at a bank, 4 months” has none of the three in extractable form. “Cooperative Training – Branch Operations | [Bank Name] | 01/2026 – 05/2026” has all of them.
• Use the posting’s own vocabulary where it truthfully describes you. If the posting says “reconciliation”, write reconciliation, not “balancing accounts”. Our guide to decoding a job posting covers how to pull those terms.
• Keep the file plain. One column, standard headings, text-based PDF, Western digits. See the ATS rules — they apply to graduates exactly as they apply to executives.

Applying while you build the record

Two things run in parallel. You apply now with the CV you have, and you keep adding dated, named experience so the CV is stronger next quarter: a Tamheer placement, a volunteer role with a real title, a freelance client, a certificate that matches the roles you keep seeing.

This is where TrueSira helps. You keep one Master Profile holding every real thing you have done — training, projects, volunteering, courses — and when a posting appears you paste it and get a tailored, ATS-ready one-page CV built from that material, with each line traced to something you actually did and shown to you for approval before it goes in. Nothing invented, nothing forgotten. Get started free.

FAQ

What do I put on a CV if I have never worked?

Cooperative training, Tamheer, internships, volunteer roles, student committee positions, freelance work, family-business work, your graduation project, and filtered courses. Write each as something you produced with a countable output, not as something you attended or observed.

Does cooperative training count as work experience in Saudi Arabia?

Yes. Saudi employers know التدريب التعاوني well and read it as real supervised experience. Put it in the Experience section with the employer’s name, your function, exact dates, and three bullets about what you produced.

Should a fresh graduate CV be one page?

One page. A two-page CV from someone with no employment history reads as padding, and the reviewer’s attention is concentrated on the top third anyway. If you cannot fill a page, your bullets are written too thinly — add the numbers and outputs back in.

Do Doroob certificates belong on a CV?

Yes, filtered. Keep the three or four that point at the job you are applying for, with platform and year, and move the rest to LinkedIn. A long undifferentiated list of certificates reads as collecting rather than choosing.

How do I write a graduation project as an achievement?

Four bullets: the problem, your specific role in the team, the tools, and the measurable result. Name your own contribution honestly — claiming a whole team project is the fastest way to lose credibility in the interview.

Should I apply to Tamheer while job hunting?

Yes, in parallel. Tamheer is an on-the-job training programme for Saudi graduates run through the HRDF and the Taqat platform, and it produces exactly the dated, named, supervised experience an empty CV needs. Confirm current eligibility conditions, duration and the monthly allowance on the official platform before you plan around it.