Informal Work Experience and Activities: If you have formal paid work experience, certainly include it. Otherwise, you can include informal work like babysitting, pet sitting, lawn mowing, shoveling snow, or anything else you've done to earn money. Even if you didn't collect a regular paycheck, informal work still displays skills and your reliability as an employee.

Since most high school students haven't held a lot of jobs, it is important to draw upon all aspects of your life that show you have the character, work ethic, skills, and personality to succeed in a job.

Mention your extracurricular activities, volunteer work, academics, and athletic pursuits.

List Leadership Roles: If you held any sort of leadership positions in these roles (such as secretary of a club or team captain), be sure to note this. For each item, include a bulleted list of your responsibilities and accomplishments.

Promote Your Attitude and Performance: Employers will be most interested in your work habits and attitude. They don't expect you to have a lot of experience. If you have perfect or near-perfect attendance and are punctual for school and other commitments, you might include language to that effect when describing an experience.

If supervisors, teachers, or coaches have recognized you for a positive attitude or outstanding service, mention it in your description of the activity.

Mention Your Achievements: Employers look for staff who have a history of making positive contributions. Review each of your experiences and ask yourself if there are achievements in class, clubs, sports, or the workplace that you can include. If so, use verbs like enhanced, reorganized, increased, improved, initiated, upgraded, or expanded to show what you accomplished. Include any challenging advanced academic projects since this shows employers that you are intelligent and a hard worker.