Student CV templates

What the category actually means

The defining property is sequence. A student layout opens with a short summary, then education, then projects or coursework, then experience of whatever kind you have, then skills. A professional layout opens with experience because that is where the evidence is. Swapping those two is the entire adaptation, and it is why using a professional template with less text in it produces a document that looks like a career gone wrong rather than a career not yet started.

The second property is that the page has to be filled honestly rather than padded. A student layout gives room to things a professional layout has no slot for: a dissertation with a real client, a society role with a real budget, a part-time job with real responsibility, a hackathon project other people used. Those are not filler. For a first job they are the most job-like evidence you own.

1. Summary, three lines. What you are studying, what you want to do, one thing you have actually done.
2. Education with detail. Degree, institution, expected classification, and the two or three modules relevant to this application.
3. Projects. One or two, each with a constraint, what you did, and what happened. A project with an external client outranks a graded assignment.
4. Work, including the part-time job. Hours, duration, responsibility. Two years in a stockroom is evidence of reliability that no society role can match.
5. Skills, short and provable. Six that appear elsewhere on the page beat twenty that appear only here.

Who should stop using one

This category has an expiry date, and using it past that date works against you.

• Once you have two years of relevant full-time work. Experience should now lead, and education should compress to two lines. An education-first layout at that point reads as having nothing more recent to show.
• Career changers. The temptation is strong, because a new qualification feels like the headline. It is not: the years of real work you already have are more persuasive, even from another field, and they need a layout that leads with them.
• Postgraduate and research applications. Publications, supervisors, funding and teaching have conventions of their own. The academic sheet in the gallery handles them; a student layout flattens them.
• Anyone with a substantial internship history. Three internships at named companies is an experience section. Lead with it.

The Appliora templates in this category

• Student / First Job

  The layout built for this sequence: education first, projects given room, and a structure that does not leave holes when the experience section is short. The default choice for students, interns and graduates. Open Student / First Job in the builder.

• ATS Clean

  Graduate schemes and large employers frequently run high-volume portals, and this is the most conservative single-column sheet in the collection. Reorder the sections so education comes first and you have a student CV that carries no parsing risk. Open ATS Clean in the builder.

• Swiss One Page

  A dense grid that holds a first CV on one page without looking empty, which is the specific problem a student layout has to solve. Its column structure makes it the wrong choice for a portal, so use it when a person is reading: a careers fair, a direct email, a referral. Open Swiss One Page in the builder.

• Bold Modern

  A colour band that gives a short CV presence without padding it. It suits early-career applications to startups, growth and brand teams, where the register is informal and the document is read by a person. Open Bold Modern in the builder.

All 20 layouts, with previews, are in the gallery.

A layout cannot make weak content strong

A student layout can stop a thin CV from looking thin. It cannot stop it from being thin, and the difference shows up in the first phone call. The work is in finding evidence you already have and have not counted, which almost everybody has.

The reliable places to look: a dissertation done for an organisation rather than for a module, a society treasurer role where you actually handled money, a part-time job where you were trusted with opening or closing, a volunteer rota you built, a tutoring arrangement you ran for a year. Each of those has a constraint, an action and a result in it, which is the same structure as a professional achievement bullet. Adjectives are what fills the space when this search has not been done.

Questions people actually ask

Should a student CV be one page?

Yes, in almost every case. A first CV that runs to two pages is usually padded, and the padding is visible. One well-filled page with a project described properly reads as more substantial than two pages of modules and adjectives.

Do I include my part-time job if it is unrelated?

Yes. A graduate employer is buying reliability as much as skill, and two years of turning up for shifts while studying is direct evidence of it. Write it with the responsibility named: hours per week, duration, and what you were trusted with.

Should I list my grades?

Include your degree classification or prediction, and the two or three modules relevant to the application. A full transcript belongs in an attachment if it is asked for. Naming your strongest modules is more useful than a classification alone, because it tells a reader which part of the degree you will actually bring.

When do I switch away from a student template?

When you have roughly two years of relevant full-time work, or when your internships would fill an experience section on their own. At that point move education below experience and cut it to the degree, institution and dates.