Marketing CV and cover letter example for school leavers

The blank page is the worst part. You open a document, type your name and then sit there wondering what goes underneath it when you've never had a marketing job. Good news on two fronts. A school leaver's marketing CV has a known shape, every block of it can be filled from the life you've already had and the whole thing fits on one page. Better still, this is the one sector where the CV isn't even the main event.

Say that plainly, because it changes everything below. In marketing, a link to things you've made beats a paragraph describing what you're like. Your CV's real job is to be tidy, honest and quick to read, then hand over to your portfolio. Get both done in the next ten minutes.

One rule before we start, the same one 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.

The one-page marketing CV, block by block

Name and contact details. Name at the top, then your mobile number and a sensible email address. If yours involves a nickname from year eight, make a new one tonight. It takes two minutes and this is a job about how things look to strangers.

Your portfolio link. Directly under your contact details, before anything else. One clean line: "Portfolio: [your link]". It can be a free one-page site, a public folder, a slide deck exported as a PDF or a well-kept account - the platform matters far less than it working when they click it. Put four to six pieces in it, each with one sentence saying what it was for and what happened. This block is why you'll get read.

Personal statement. Two or three lines, specific, no clichés. "Year 13 student applying for my first marketing role. I've run the account for our school's charity week for two years, writing the posts and filming the videos myself. I'd rather show you than tell you, so the portfolio link is above." Don't write "creative, passionate self-starter with a love of brands". Every employer has read that sentence a thousand times and believed it none of them.

Education. School or college, years attended, then your GCSEs or predicted grades. Lead with English, since so much of this job is writing, then maths, since so much of the rest is numbers. One line for anything relevant: a media or business qualification, an extended project, any free online course you actually finished.

Experience that counts. Here's where "no experience" gets translated. Ran a club or team account? "Planned and posted a term of content for the school netball team, including match graphics and player features." Sold on Vinted or Depop? "Photographed, priced and described stock, handling all buyer messages." Made posters for the school play, edited videos for a mate's band, wrote for the student paper, promoted a charity night that sold out - each becomes one line, verb at the front, result at the end. Put your real numbers in where you have them. They don't need to be big. They need to be true.

Tools and skills. Short list, each one provable: the design tool you actually use, video editing, spreadsheets, whichever scheduling or email platform you've touched, photography from a phone. If you can't back a skill with something in your portfolio, leave it off. This is a sector where somebody will absolutely open the software and ask you to show them.

Availability. Two lines, exact: "Available from July, full-time, or part-time around college until then." It answers the question sitting in the reader's head before they have to ask it.

Reference. One line: "Reference available from [teacher, coach or the manager of your Saturday job] on request." A named adult who'll vouch for you settles the biggest question anyone has about a first-timer.

A word on format. Save it as a PDF so the layout can't collapse on somebody else's laptop, name the file properly - "Sam-Patel-CV.pdf", not "cv final FINAL v2.pdf" - and check the portfolio link works from a phone, logged out, on mobile data. A dead link is the most avoidable rejection in this entire industry.

Tune the emphasis to the employer too. An agency wants range and energy, so lead with the variety of what you've made. An in-house team at a single company wants somebody organised who'll stick around, so let reliability carry the statement. A charity wants to feel you care about the cause. Same facts, different order.

The cover letter, paragraph by paragraph

Keep it under half a page, addressed to a person if the advert names one. Four short paragraphs do the whole job. Remember that in this sector the letter is also a writing sample, so it needs to sound like a human being rather than a template.

Paragraph one: why this employer. Name them, give a real reason. "I'm applying for the marketing assistant role. I've followed your account since the Christmas campaign last year - the one shot entirely on a phone in the shop - because it looked like the work of a team that isn't precious about polish."

Paragraph two: what you bring. Match your evidence to their needs in two or three sentences. "I've run our school's charity week account for two years, which means writing captions on a deadline, filming with whoever's free at lunchtime and answering messages from parents politely when the raffle sells out. My portfolio link is on my CV."

Paragraph three: availability and appetite. "I'm free full-time from July. I'm looking for somewhere I can learn properly rather than somewhere impressive, so a small team suits me."

Paragraph four: the close. One sentence, no grovelling. "I'd love the chance to talk you through the work - thank you for reading."

That's it. Somebody reads that in forty seconds, then clicks your link. As our sitewide guide to landing your first job puts it, the letter's whole signal is that you bothered.

Notice what it never does. It never apologises for your age, because youth framed properly is a selling point: fresh eyes, no bad habits, genuinely teachable. It never repeats the CV line by line, because the letter's job is voice while the CV's job is facts. And it never pads.

The five mistakes marketing employers see constantly

Nothing to click. An application about creative work with no example of creative work attached. This is the single biggest one. Even three captions written for a shop you like beats an empty application.

Adjectives instead of artefacts. "Passionate, creative, driven, innovative." Nobody has ever been hired on those words. Swap every adjective for a thing you made.

An application that reads like a robot wrote it. Use AI to sharpen your own sentences by all means, never to generate them from nothing. You're applying to the exact profession that spends all day spotting generic copy, so a letter with no fingerprints on it fails faster here than anywhere else.

Typos in a job about writing. Their and there, its and it's, a sentence that stops halfway. Read it out loud, then get one adult to read it after you.

Obviously never having looked at them. The wrong company name, praise for a campaign they didn't run, a letter that would fit any employer on the board. Thirty seconds on their website prevents all three.

A sixth, quietly fatal: a portfolio link that needs permission to view. Test it on a device that isn't yours before every send.

When the writing itself is the wall

Some people can fill in every block above and still can't make the letter sound like them. The facts are all there but 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 is for: you bring who you are and what you've genuinely done, 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 one. Because the more you sound like a person on paper, the more somebody wants to meet the person.

Draft both documents tonight while this is fresh, build the portfolio link over the weekend and send the lot somewhere real next week. Junior marketing adverts fill fast, so a good application sent on day one beats a perfect one sent on day seven. Get ahead of what comes next with our 10 common marketing interview questions, swing back to the marketing hub for the rest of the series and keep an eye on live marketing jobs so the right advert never slips past you. The blank page is finished - go get the interview.