A hiring manager at a grocery store, a day camp, or a fast food counter is not expecting work history from a 15-year-old. They are reading for three things: will you show up when scheduled, can you learn the job quickly, and can you deal with people. A teenage resume wins by proving those three through what you already have, which is school, activities, informal jobs, and volunteering.

That is also why most teen resume advice fails you. Template galleries show you boxes to fill without showing what a finished teen resume actually says, and generic articles tell you to 'highlight your skills' without explaining how babysitting or lawn mowing becomes a credible experience entry with dates and numbers. This page does the opposite. You get a complete resume for a 16-year-old applying to a real part-time job, a breakdown of exactly what changes at 14, a table that turns everyday teen activities into strong resume lines, availability lines that respect youth work rules, and a fill-in template you can copy.

The example below is a high school junior applying for a part-time grocery cashier role. Notice what it does not have: a single formal employer. Every entry is informal work, school, or an activity, and it still reads like the resume of someone a store manager would trust with a register. Lawn mowing and pet sitting appear as real experience entries with dates and client counts, cash handling comes from a school fundraiser, and the availability line answers the manager's first scheduling question before they ask it.

A teen resume has a fixed, sensible order: contact details, a short objective, education, experience, activities, skills, and availability. References are optional but strong at this age because they substitute for the work history you do not have yet. Here is what each section is doing in the example above, and how to write yours.

Name, city and state, phone number, email. That is the whole section. The email matters more than teens expect: a manager who sees skaterboi2010 or an email full of x's forms an opinion before reading a word. Make a free address from your first and last name, and check it daily once you start applying, because that is where interview invitations land. City and state are enough for location. Skip the street address, which we cover in the leave-it-off section below.

Experienced adults usually skip the objective. Teens should keep it, because it does a job nothing else on the page can: it names the role you want and the one or two things that make you a safe hire for it. 'Reliable high school junior seeking a part-time cashier position; two years of paid neighborhood work and cash handling experience from a school fundraiser' tells the manager everything in one breath. Keep it to two lines, name the actual job, and swap it for each application. There are more patterns to borrow in our resume objective examples.

School is your main occupation, so it earns a top spot. List your high school, its city, and your expected graduation year. Add honor roll, a strong GPA, and relevant coursework if it connects to the job, like a business or consumer math class for a cashier role. One entry is all you need. Nobody wants your middle school.

This is where most teenage resumes go wrong. Teens assume experience means a W-2 job, write 'none,' and submit a half-empty page. Paid informal work is experience. Babysitting for three families, mowing six lawns a week every summer, pet sitting when neighbors travel: each of those is an entry with a title you give it (Babysitter, Lawn Care, Pet Sitter), a date range, and bullets with numbers. The manager reading it learns exactly what they need to know, which is that people in your neighborhood trusted you with their kids, their homes, and their money, repeatedly, over time.

Write each entry the way the example does: what you did, for how many clients or how often, for how long, and anything measurable. 'Mowed and edged six lawns weekly from May through September, keeping every client for a second summer' is a better line than many adults manage.

Clubs, teams, and volunteering prove commitment, which is the trait a first employer worries about most. A student who made six cross country practices a week for two seasons will make a Saturday shift. List the activity, your role if you held one, and the years. Volunteering with a regular schedule is especially strong because it looks exactly like showing up for work, unpaid.

List five to eight skills, and make at least half of them point at the posting. For a cashier: cash handling, customer service, basic math, punctuality, Spanish if you have it, and any software you genuinely use. Skip empty entries like 'hard worker,' which is a claim, not a skill. Your experience bullets should prove the hard work; the skills list is for things a manager can act on when building a schedule or a till rotation.

Almost no adult resume has this line, and almost every teen resume should. Part-time hiring is a scheduling puzzle, and a manager choosing between two similar applicants picks the one whose availability is already on the page. One line near the bottom does it: which school days you can work and from what time, your weekend availability, and what changes in summer. The next section shows exactly how to write it within the legal limits for your age.

Adults usually leave references off and provide them on request, and that is the standard advice in our guide to references on a resume. Teens are the exception. With no employer to call, a teacher, coach, or a parent you babysit for carries real weight, and listing two of them with their permission saves the manager a step. Name, how they know you, and a phone number or email. Never list your mom, your uncle, or anyone who shares your last name; a family reference reads as having no one else to vouch for you.

The same structure works at 14, with the experience section built entirely from informal work and volunteering. Take a concrete case: a ninth grader applying for a junior counselor role at a city day camp. Their one-page resume holds everything the camp director needs to say yes.

Nothing on that page is padded, and nothing is a formal job. That is the point. At 14, a resume is an organized argument that you show up and can be trusted, assembled from the life you already have.

The same way, with one upgrade: by 16 most teens have done some paid informal work, and it belongs on the page as real entries with dates, not as a vague line in a skills section. The cashier example above is exactly this pattern. Lawn mowing and pet sitting are listed like jobs because they were jobs: recurring, paid, and performed to someone else's standard. If you have genuinely done nothing paid, the 14-year-old formula still works at 16, and volunteering plus a committed activity will carry the page.

Two quick definitional answers while we are here. If you are outside the US and an employer asks for a CV, a curriculum vitae (CV) for a teenager is the same one-page document; the word changes, the content does not. And the 'five P's of a resume' that teachers sometimes mention is an informal classroom mnemonic, with the exact words varying by whoever is teaching it. The advice underneath is stable: keep it short, keep it accurate, keep it professional, proofread it, and match it to the job. Do those five things and you have satisfied every version of the mnemonic.

The difference between a weak teenage resume and a strong one is rarely the activities. It is the writing. A weak line names the activity; a strong line adds scope, duration, and a number, which turns 'I did a thing' into 'I did a thing reliably, at a measurable scale.' Here is the conversion for the most common teen experiences. The numbers are illustrations; swap in your own real ones, and never inflate them, because a manager can ask about any line in the interview.

Your availability line has to fit inside youth employment law, and that law changes with your age. Here is the general US federal picture under the Fair Labor Standards Act, in plain words. Fourteen is the minimum age for most non-farm jobs. At 14 and 15, federal rules cap work at 3 hours on a school day and 18 hours in a school week, allow up to 8 hours on a non-school day and 40 in a non-school week, and restrict work to between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. during the school year, extending to 9 p.m. in summer. At 16 and 17, the federal hour caps fall away, but hazardous occupations stay off limits until 18.

States add their own layer, and it is often stricter: many require a work permit or working papers, and many set their own hour and night-work limits for 16 and 17 year olds. The Department of Labor's youth employment pages are the source to check on the day you write your resume, along with your own state's labor department site, because these rules do get updated and your state's version is the one your employer follows.

With the rules in hand, the availability line writes itself. Patterns that work:

One honest warning: do not promise availability you cannot keep. If cross country season eats your weekday afternoons from August to November, say so in the interview. A manager would far rather schedule around a known conflict than lose a trained cashier to one.

If you want to draft on paper or in a blank document first, copy this skeleton and replace every bracketed prompt. Each line tells you what goes there and why.

What you exclude signals judgment as much as what you include. Leave off all of the following.

This page is built for teenagers aged 14 to 17 applying to part-time and summer jobs. If you are a senior building a resume for college programs, scholarships, or internships, the student resume examples cover that stage with its own conventions. If you are an adult with no work history, the approach differs enough that teen advice will mislead you, and the general process of structuring and writing the document lives in our resume writing guide. And since many part-time applications ask for a short letter alongside the resume, the part-time job cover letter example shows one with its own availability line.

You now know what goes on the page. The fastest way to get it there is to open a student-friendly layout from the free resume templates, which opens in Roleframe's free resume builder with no account and no card. Fill in your sections, drag them into the order that puts your strongest proof first, and download a free PDF with no watermark. The PDF has real selectable text, so it prints cleanly for in-person applications and parses correctly when an online application system reads it. Always submit the PDF rather than a Word file; it is the format that keeps your layout intact on every screen it lands on.