How to Get Your First Internship When You Have No Experience

When companies say they want candidates with experience, they do not usually mean they want someone who has already done the exact job. They mean they want evidence that the candidate can function in a professional environment — that they can take a brief, do work, and produce an output without constant supervision.

That evidence does not have to come from a previous job. It can come from a school project with a measurable outcome, a competition, a personal initiative, or a verified assessment result that demonstrates the underlying aptitude.

The Eduentry assessment is explicitly designed for students who have no prior work experience. There is no CV question, no requirement to list previous roles.

Instead, it measures four things directly: how you reason with words, how you handle numbers, how you would behave in a professional situation, and how much you already know about your chosen field. A strong result in any of these is evidence that a selector can act on — even if you have never held a job.

1. Take the assessment. Your score is a credible data point. A 78th-percentile domain knowledge result in Technology is something you can reference in any application.

2. Build one specific output. Pick a project you can complete in two weeks — a short report, a small website, a data analysis of something you care about. The quality matters less than having something concrete to describe.

3. Write the email. Most high school students never contact companies directly. A short, specific email that says "I am studying for my GCSEs, I am interested in [field], I scored in the top quartile on the Eduentry assessment, and I would like to apply for a short placement" will be read by most people who receive it.

The first placement is the hardest. After it, you have a supervisor who can vouch for you, a piece of work you contributed to, and a story you can tell in every subsequent application.

Students who complete an Eduentry placement in Year 10 arrive at their Year 12 university interviews with two years of compounding experience and a reference from a real organisation. That is a structurally different application from a student who started looking for experience after their A-level results.