1. Start a running record of everything you do

This is the tip that sounds the least exciting and matters the most. From your first week at uni, keep a simple document somewhere and log everything. Casual jobs, volunteer shifts, club involvement, events you helped organise, skills you picked up, subjects you excelled in. Anything.

It’s very likely that you won’t remember all of it in two years. You will definitely not remember the specifics. And specifics are what make a resume entry useful rather than vague.

It doesn’t need to be overly formatted or polished. A running list in your notes app is totally fine. The point is that when you sit down to write or update your resume, you aren’t starting from scratch trying to reconstruct your entire uni experience from memory.

Pro tip: Date your entries as you go. It sounds tedious but knowing roughly when you did something saves a lot of guessing later.

2. Volunteer work and extracurriculars are real experience

If you are involved in clubs, student societies, volunteering, community sport or events, that counts on a resume. Employers hiring students and graduates know you have not been running a department for three years. What they are looking for is evidence that you can show up, take on responsibility and work with other people.

List these the same way you would list a job: the role or title, the organisation, the dates, and two or three bullet points on what you actually did. "Treasurer, ANU Astronomy Society" with a note about managing a budget, coordinating events or other relevant skills is a legitimate resume entry and one worth having.

3. Tailor your resume for each application

Sending the same resume to every job is one of the most common mistakes students make. Employers can tell when something is generic and many applications are filtered before a human even reads them.

Read the job description carefully and match your language to it. If a job mentions "event coordination" and you help run an O-Week stall for your student society, that is relevant and you should say so in terms that connect the two.

Keep a full master version of your resume with everything in it, then adjust and trim for each specific role. It takes an extra fifteen minutes and it is so worth it.

4. Format like you mean it

A resume that is hard to read does not get read. You don’t need a design-heavy template with columns and colour blocks. Those often break when uploaded to application systems anyway. What you need is clean, consistent and easy to skim.

A few things that are going to be really helpful:

• One to two pages. As a student, one page is usually right. Two pages is fine if you have the content to genuinely fill it.
• Readable font, standard size. Calibri, Arial or similar at 10 to 12pt. Nothing fancy.
• Consistent formatting throughout. If one job title is bold, all of them should be. If you use bullet points in one section, use them in all of them.
• No photo, no date of birth. These are not standard in Australian resumes.

Save it as a PDF unless an application specifically asks for Word. It will look the same on every device.

5. Get someone else to read your work

Not just for typos. For clarity. After hours of working on your own resume, your brain fills in gaps that aren’t actually there. Someone reading it fresh will tell you whether it makes sense, what is missing and whether it reads the way you intend it to.

Ask them directly: does this make me sound like someone you would want to hire? What is unclear? A friend, a family member or a mentor can catch things you have read past ten times without noticing.

6. Your coursework is worth including

If you complete a major project, research paper, case study or group assignment that is relevant to a role you are applying for, you can list it. A "Relevant Projects" section is a legitimate way to show applied skills when your formal work history is still building.

Be specific about what you did and what the outcome was. If you are studying the Bachelor of Political Science and you write a policy analysis on electoral behaviour for a course like Australian Politics, that is something worth putting on a resume when you are applying for a government or public sector role. "Analysed voter behaviour trends in Australian federal elections, presented findings in a written policy brief" says a lot more than "studied politics”.

Want some extra help? Head to ANU Careers and Employability

All of the above is a solid starting point, but there is a whole team on campus whose job is to help you with exactly this.

ANU Careers & Employability works with current students to build employability skills, including resume writing, job applications and career planning. To connect with the team, log into ANU Career Central where you can book a one-on-one appointment with a careers consultant, get AI-assisted resume feedback, register for events, browse jobs and work through e-learning resources.

If you are in first year and your resume is basically a blank document with your name on it, that’s fine. This is exactly the right time to go!