First job hunt with no work history: what actually goes in the top third of the page? Resume

The shop job is not irrelevant and whoever told you that has not hired for an entry-level role. What matters is not the sector, it is that you turned up reliably to something with a rota while doing a degree, handled money, and dealt with people at their worst. Put it on, one line of context and two bullets with numbers in them. The top third should be: what you are, the project with its result stated plainly, then the shop job as evidence you are employable rather than theoretical.

Skip the professional summary entirely at this stage. Every graduate summary reads the same way because everyone is describing potential rather than history, and it burns the most valuable space on the page. Start with education, then projects, then work. You can add a summary in three years when you have something to summarise.

Give the coursework project the treatment you would give a job. What was the problem, what did you build or find, what happened at the end, and what would you change. Two bullets and a link if there is anything to look at. I got my first role almost entirely on a project section and the interview was ninety percent about it.

One page, single column, dates on the right, no photo unless your market expects one. Everything else is decoration.

Went through this last year with the same shape of history. The thing that changed my callback rate was cutting the page down to one and removing the skills word cloud, which was mostly things I had used once in a tutorial. Nobody asked about a single item on it and it was making the real material harder to find.