Landing an Internship With a Professional Resume

However, internships are worth nothing if you cannot properly express what you have done. Hence why you need to learn how to turn minimal or no work experience into an advantage and create an impressive and convincing resume.

What to include and how?

No matter what it was, even if you had a summer job or you were a volunteer, include it in your resume without remorse: it shows an employer a glimpse of your character, plus it proves that you are dedicated even at such a young age. However, if you lack work experience, don’t worry, just exclude professional experience from your CV and replace it with your education or your major achievements.

When composing the education section focus on the key elements, such as 3.0+ GPAs, relevant coursework, any honors or awards you have won, and extracurricular activities. But if you prefer to let the recruiters know your major accomplishments instead, you can include virtually everything providing it highlights your educational experiences or activities that are relevant to the internship you are applying for. The only thing to keep in mind is that you need to stick to the utmost professionalism: in other words, use bullet points, the right emphases, and a reverse chronological order – with the exception of parts written in the functional writing format.

Sample internship resume from Hloom’s template

Do not forget to showcase your character traits, relevant skills and abilities when detailing your career objective. And before you ask, the career objective is not a statement of what you are looking for but an explanation of what you can bring to the table and how you can further improve the performance of the company that you are applying to. And last but not least, make sure to include industry specific keywords (trigger words), and fine tune relevant sections with numbers to help recruiters measure and illustrate your set of skills.

Recommended online resume builders for you

Since you’re likely fresh out of school or college it’s probable that you have limited financial resources, and so it is best to look for online resume builders that are either completely free of charge – albeit with minor limitations – or offer money back guarantees.

If you want a decent, free of charge resume builder, your best pick is Resumonk. It provides the creation of an unlimited amount of CVs from scratch or from LinkedIn, five different CV templates, a PDF-download option and the option to share your resume in an online format. A more advanced resume builder is VisualCV, which even allows you to add videos to your documents, but the free version restricts you to creating only two resumes.