Graduate CV: turn your degree and university life into evidence

Graduate schemes and graduate jobs need slightly different CVs

"Graduate job" covers two quite different things in the UK, and it helps to know which one you are applying for before you touch your CV.

A graduate scheme is a structured programme, usually lasting one to three years, run by a larger employer such as a bank, a retailer, an engineering firm, a consultancy or a part of the public sector. You join with a group of other graduates, often rotate between teams and get formal training. Schemes recruit in a fixed cycle, receive a large number of applications and almost always use an online application system with several stages: a form or CV upload, online tests, a video interview and an assessment centre.

A graduate job is simply an entry-level role that asks for a degree: a junior marketing executive, an assistant planner, a trainee recruitment consultant, a research assistant. These are advertised all year round, often by smaller organisations, and the process is shorter. Sometimes your CV is the whole application, read by the hiring manager rather than a graduate recruitment team.

The core of your CV is the same for both. What changes is the emphasis. For a scheme, recruiters are checking that you meet the entry requirements and looking for evidence of the competencies they assess at every stage. For a direct graduate job, the person reading wants to see that you can do this specific role from day one, so relevant experience, tools and results move to the top.

When to apply: application windows and why timing matters

Many large graduate schemes open in the early autumn of your final year, and some take applications from the summer before it. Closing dates vary from autumn through to spring, but a good number of employers review applications as they arrive and close a programme early once it is full. Leaving everything until the stated deadline can mean missing a scheme that has already stopped recruiting, so check each employer's careers page and note both the opening and the closing date.

That timing has a practical consequence for your CV: you will usually write it before you have your final results. You will be using a predicted classification, a dissertation that is still in progress and modules you have only just started. That is normal, and the sections below show how to present unfinished work honestly.

Graduate jobs outside the big schemes follow the ordinary job market. They appear when a team needs someone, often with a closing date a few weeks away, and some are filled before that. Graduates who missed the scheme cycle or want to work for a smaller organisation can apply at any point in the year, including after graduation. If you are in that position, a strong, tailored CV matters even more, because there may be no form to fill in at all.

A sensible plan for final year is to have a solid master CV ready by the start of the autumn term, then spend your time tailoring it rather than writing from scratch every time a scheme opens.

Structure: a two-page graduate CV, section by section

Two pages is the maximum for a graduate CV in the UK, and one well-filled page is fine if that is all your experience needs. Do not stretch thin material to reach a second page, and do not shrink the font to squeeze three pages into two. A clean layout with clear headings is easier for both a recruiter and an application system to read; our ATS-friendly CV guide covers layout in detail.

A reliable order for a graduate is:

1. Name and contact details: phone, email, town or city, and a LinkedIn URL if your profile is up to date.
2. Personal profile: three or four lines naming your degree, the type of role you want and the strengths you can prove.
3. Education: your degree first, then A-levels or equivalent.
4. Work experience: internships, placements and part-time work in reverse chronological order.
5. Positions of responsibility and activities: society committees, sports captaincy, volunteering, student ambassador work.
6. Skills: specific tools, languages and methods.
7. Interests (optional): only if they say something useful about you.

If your most relevant experience is a society role rather than a job, it is fine to call the section "Experience" and put the strongest entry first, whatever kind of role it was. Recruiters care about what you did, not whether you were paid for it.

Education: degree classification, predicted grades and modules

For most graduate schemes, your education section is checked first, because many schemes set a minimum degree classification, often a 2:1, and sometimes minimum A-level grades or UCAS points. Make those details impossible to miss.

Write your degree in full with the classification on the same line: "BA (Hons) English Literature, Sep 2023 – Jun 2026, predicted 2:1". If you have already graduated, give the result: "BSc (Hons) Biology, 2:1". If you have strong year-by-year marks, you can add them on a second line, for example "Second-year average: 68%". Only claim a predicted grade your tutor would support if asked.

Then add what makes your degree relevant to this employer:

• Dissertation or final-year project: a one-line title plus what you did. "Dissertation: how local councils communicate flood risk, based on interviews with eight residents' groups."
• Relevant modules: three to five, chosen for the role. Statistics or research methods for analytical schemes, marketing or consumer behaviour for commercial roles, a language module if the employer works internationally.
• Awards or scholarships: a prize for top mark in a module, a scholarship or a place on the dean's list.

Put your A-levels or equivalent on a single line with subjects and grades. Add UCAS points only when an advert sets a minimum. GCSEs can usually go, or be summarised as "9 GCSEs including English and Maths", unless the employer asks for specific grades.

If you had a difficult year, mitigating circumstances or a grade below a scheme's threshold, the CV is not the place to explain it at length. Many employers have a separate question or process for this, and some use contextual recruitment to consider your results alongside your background. Check the employer's guidance and use the route they provide.

Turning university experience into evidence of competencies

Graduate recruiters rarely expect polished professional experience. What they look for is evidence of competencies: the qualities they believe predict success on their scheme. The names vary between employers, but the same few come up again and again: teamwork, leadership, communication, problem-solving, organisation, resilience, adaptability and commercial awareness. Many schemes publish theirs on their careers site.

The mistake most graduates make is to list these qualities instead of proving them. "Excellent communication skills" is a claim anyone can write. A bullet point that shows you explaining something complicated to a real audience is evidence. Work through every entry on your CV and ask: what did I actually do, for whom, and what changed because of it?

Some examples of turning weak lines into evidence:

• Weak: "Member of the Hiking Society committee."
• Strong: "Planned and risk-assessed six weekend trips for up to 40 members as trips secretary, booking transport and accommodation within a fixed budget."
• Weak: "Good at teamwork."
• Strong: "Coordinated a five-person group project on retail pricing, splitting the research, setting weekly deadlines and presenting the final report to the module leader."
• Weak: "Worked in a café during university."
• Strong: "Opened and ran the café alone on Sunday shifts, handling the till, deliveries and stock checks, and trained three new staff on food safety procedures."

Notice that none of the strong versions use the word "teamwork" or "leadership". They show it. If an advert uses a particular term, such as "stakeholder management" or "analytical thinking", it is still worth including the phrase where it fits naturally, because recruiters and application systems may search for it. Put the term next to the evidence rather than on its own.

Numbers help, but they must be real. A society budget, the number of people at an event, the hours you worked each week or the number of customers you served on a shift are all honest and checkable. If you do not know a figure, describe the scale in words instead of guessing.

If you are short of material, look again at your degree itself: group projects, presentations, a research project with real participants, a module that involved a client brief. Our guide to a CV with no experience has more ideas for building entries from coursework and activities.

Application forms plus a CV: making them work together

Most large graduate schemes ask you to complete an online application form. Some ask for a CV as well, some only ask for a CV, and some try to pre-fill the form by reading the CV you upload. Whichever way it works, you should treat the CV and the form as one application that tells one consistent story.

A few practical rules:

• Keep the facts identical. Dates, job titles, grades and the name of your degree should match exactly between the form and the CV. A recruiter who sees "Jun 2024 – Sep 2024" on one and "Summer 2024" on the other may wonder which is correct.
• Check anything the system fills in for you. If the form is pre-filled from your CV, read every field. Dates and job titles are often put in the wrong boxes, especially if your CV has an unusual layout.
• Use your CV as a source for the questions. Competency questions such as "Tell us about a time you worked in a team to solve a problem" are easier to answer if your CV already contains the evidence. Pick one or two entries, expand them into a short story covering the situation, what you did and the result, and make sure the details agree with your CV.
• Do not paste your CV into every box. Motivational questions like "Why have you applied to this scheme?" need an answer specific to that employer. Your CV supports the answer; it is not the answer.

The CV often comes back later in the process. Interviewers and assessment centre assessors may have it in front of them and ask about any line on it. That is the simplest reason to include only what you are happy to discuss in detail.

Tailoring for each scheme or graduate role

You do not need a completely new CV for each application, but you do need a quick tailoring pass. Start from your master CV and, for each role:

1. Rewrite the personal profile so it names the scheme or role type and the two or three strengths the advert asks for most.
2. Reorder the bullet points under each entry so the most relevant one comes first.
3. Swap modules and skills to match the role. A logistics scheme cares about your statistics module; a communications role cares about your writing and editing.
4. Use the advert's wording for skills you genuinely have, so a recruiter searching for "data analysis" or "project management" finds it.

For a direct graduate job at a smaller employer, go further. Name the specific skills in the job description, put your most relevant experience at the top and keep the personal profile focused on that one role. Hiring managers outside large graduate teams often read every CV in full, and a CV that speaks to their job is easy to shortlist.

A before and after example from a graduate scheme application

Chloe Bennett is a fictional English Literature student in Nottingham applying for graduate schemes in marketing and general management. Her first draft opened with "A motivated and enthusiastic graduate seeking a challenging role", listed her café job as "Barista, 2022 – now" with two lines of duties, and summed up two years as editor of a student magazine as "Editor of the student magazine". Her skills section read "Microsoft Office, communication, teamwork, creativity".

The rewritten version opens with a personal profile naming her degree, her predicted 2:1 and the marketing and management schemes she is targeting. The magazine role became the strongest entry on the page: she now explains that she led a team of twelve volunteer writers, planned each issue against print deadlines, grew the magazine's social media following and brought in local advertisers to cover printing costs. The café job shows her running shifts and training staff. Her skills list names tools she actually uses, such as Canva, Google Analytics and Excel, instead of general qualities.

Nothing new was added. The experience had been there all along; it was simply described as duties rather than evidence. Checked against a marketing scheme advert, her CV went from an indicative score of 48 to 85.

Check your graduate CV before you apply

Before you submit, run your CV through our free ATS CV checker with the scheme's advert pasted in. It reads your file in the browser and shows whether your contact details, sections, education and skills come through cleanly, then compares your keywords with that advert and lists what to fix. The score is a guide to improvements, not a prediction of the outcome.

If you would rather start from what you already have, StudentCV can rewrite and tailor your CV to a specific graduate scheme or job. Upload your current CV or LinkedIn profile, or type your details in, and paste the advert. You can see and edit the whole CV for free and only pay if you want to download it as a PDF or Word file, as a one-off purchase with no subscription. If you are also applying for technical roles, see our computer science CV guide; for law firms, the law student CV guide covers vacation schemes and training contracts.