Tech CV and cover letter example for school leavers

The blank page is the worst part of the whole process. You open a document, type your name, then sit there wondering what goes underneath when you've never been paid for anything. Good news: a tech CV for a school leaver has a known shape, every block of it can be filled from things you've already done and the whole lot fits on one page. Give this guide ten minutes and you'll finish with both documents drafted.

One rule before we start, the same rule that governs everything on FIRSTJOBZ: nothing here gets invented. Everything below is school, hobby and volunteering-grade truth, arranged well. That's all a good first CV has ever been - and in tech especially, invented claims die fast, because the interview will ask you to explain the thing you said you could do.

The one-page tech CV, block by block

Name and contact details. Name big at the top, then mobile and a sensible email address. If yours involves a gamertag from year eight, make a new one. It takes two minutes and IT managers absolutely notice.

Your links line. This is the tech-specific block almost nobody your age includes, which is exactly why it works. One short line under your contact details pointing at anything you've made: a GitHub profile with two small honest projects, a simple portfolio page, even a shared folder of photos of the PC you built. It does not need to be impressive. It needs to exist.

Availability. Two lines, exact: "Available: full-time from June, immediate start possible, happy with early shifts and occasional weekend cover." Support teams are rota-driven, so this answers the manager's first question in the first three seconds.

Personal statement. Two or three lines, specific, plain English: "Year 13 student looking for a first-line support role. I've been the person who fixes things at home and at school for years - built my own PC, run the sound desk for school productions, currently working through a networking course in my own time. Patient with people who find tech frustrating." That's plenty. Never write "passionate about cutting-edge technology"; every IT manager has read it a thousand times.

Education. School name, years and your GCSEs or predicted grades, leading with maths and English because tickets and users need both. Add computing or IT if you took it. One line for anything extra: an online course you finished, a first aid certificate, Duke of Edinburgh.

Projects and things you've built. The block that does the heavy lifting. Each entry gets a verb at the front and a sentence on what you learned. "Built a desktop PC from parts, including choosing compatible components and troubleshooting a boot failure that turned out to be RAM seating." "Set up a home file server on an old laptop so the family could share photos." "Wrote a Python script to rename and sort several hundred photos." "Ran a Discord server for a gaming community of around two hundred, managing roles, permissions and moderation." Two to four entries is plenty and each one is an interview conversation waiting to happen.

Experience that counts. Anything paid or unpaid that shows the human half of the job. A Saturday job on a till proves you stay calm with frustrated strangers, which is precisely what a service desk is. Fixed laptops for family and neighbours? Say so, with a line on the kind of faults. Helped at a community centre, a church or a school open evening with the tech? All of it counts.

Skills. Short, honest, provable. Windows, basic networking, hardware assembly, a bit of Python, Microsoft 365. If you can't hold a two-minute conversation about it, it doesn't go on the page. Overstating here is the single most common way first-timers lose an interview they'd otherwise have won.

Reference. One line: "Reference available from [teacher/coach name] on request." A named adult who'll vouch for you settles the biggest question a manager has about a first-timer.

Save it as a PDF so the layout can't collapse on someone else's screen, name the file properly - "Sam-Patel-CV.pdf", not "cv-final-FINAL-2.pdf" - and keep a printed copy in your bag for walk-ins at repair shops and small IT firms.

Tune the emphasis to the employer, too. A managed service provider supporting lots of small businesses wants to hear about your patience with people. An in-house team at a school wants reliability and a clean DBS process. A junior developer advert wants your projects at the top, above everything else. Same facts, different order.

The cover letter, paragraph by paragraph

Under half a page, addressed to a person if the advert names one. Four short paragraphs do the whole job.

Paragraph one: why this company. Name them, show you understood what they do. "I'm applying for the first-line support apprenticeship. You look after IT for schools and small firms across the county, which appeals to me because I'd rather learn on lots of different setups than one office."

Paragraph two: what you bring. Match your evidence to their needs in two or three sentences. "I'm the person friends and family ring when something breaks. I built my own PC last year and spent an evening working out why it wouldn't boot rather than giving up on it. I'm also used to explaining things patiently - I taught my grandad to video call, which took several goes."

Paragraph three: availability and appetite. "I can start full-time in June and I'm happy with early shifts. I'm looking for somewhere that will train me properly, ideally towards certifications, because I want to build a real career in IT rather than just a job."

Paragraph four: the close. One sentence, no grovelling. "I'd welcome the chance to show you how I think through a problem - thank you for reading."

That's it. A manager reads it in forty seconds and knows you bothered, which - as our sitewide guide to landing your first job puts it - is the entire signal a cover letter exists to send.

Notice what the letter never does. It never apologises for your age or your empty work history, because youth framed properly is a selling point: energy, no bad habits, genuinely teachable. It never repeats the CV line by line, since the CV holds facts while the letter holds voice. And it never pads.

The five mistakes IT managers see constantly

The buzzword list you can't back. Fifteen technologies across the bottom of the page, three of which you've only heard of. One follow-up question exposes the lot. List less, know it properly.

The wrong company's name in the letter. The copy-paste tell. Read every application once slowly before it goes.

Jargon where plain English belongs. Half of what a support role is being screened for is whether you can explain things simply. A CV crammed with acronyms proves the opposite. Write like you'd explain it to your mum.

No availability, no links. Two blocks that take a minute each and separate you from most of the pile. Leaving them out is throwing away free ground.

Unproofed writing. Their and there, its and it's, a statement that stops mid-sentence. Nobody expects poetry from a first-jobber, but careless errors read as carelessness generally - and carelessness is the one trait no IT manager will hire. Get one adult to read it before it goes anywhere.

When the writing itself is the wall

Some people can fill in every block above and still can't get the letter to sound like them. The facts are all there; the sentences come out stiff. If that's you, get help with the flourish, never the facts. That's exactly what the FIRSTJOBZ cover letter service does: you bring who you are and what you've genuinely built, we make it read the way you'd say it on a good day. Flourish, not fabrication - the difference between polishing your story and inventing someone else's. Because the more you sound like a person on paper, the more a busy manager wants to meet the person.

Draft both tonight while this page is fresh, then send them somewhere real this week. Speed counts for a lot in junior tech hiring and an advert answered in its first two days lands in a far shorter pile than one answered on the deadline. Once applications are out, get ahead of the next stage with our 10 common tech interview questions, swing back to the tech hub for the rest of the series and keep an eye on live tech jobs so the right advert never slips past. The blank page is finished - go get the interview.