Getting your first job when you have no experience

Looking for work costs money you may not have. Most advice skips that part, so we start there.

Research by Youth Capital, reported by IOL on 18 July 2026, puts the average cost of looking for a job at R1 469 a month: R700 on transport, R441 on internet and R328 on the applications themselves. Earlier research had it at R938. Eighty-five percent of the young people surveyed said they had to choose between buying food and looking for work, and seven in ten relied on family for the money to keep going.

So the useful question is where to spend that money so that it buys you something, rather than how to try harder.

What employers mean when they say experience

Many adverts ask for one to two years. Sometimes that is a hard requirement and sometimes a preference, and from the outside you often cannot tell which.

When a vacancy draws a lot of applications, the first cut may be made against screening criteria rather than by someone reading every CV in full. It might be a knockout question on the application form, a keyword search, or a filter on a qualification or on years of experience. How it works differs between employers, agencies and systems, and a person usually reads the shortlist. The candidates who reach that person tend to be the ones whose CVs make the advert's requirements easy to find.

So use the advert's own words on your CV, honestly, and put the qualification or skill it asks for where a reader or a filter will find it. Apply to the one-to-two-years adverts where you meet most of the rest, and spend less of your budget on the ones where you do not.

Where agencies fit at this level

Do not rely on recruitment agencies as your only route into a first job. Many entry-level jobs are filled directly, or through channels that handle a lot of applicants. Some agencies do specialise in junior, temporary and volume recruitment, and those are worth registering with.

Use several channels rather than one: the free platforms below, direct applications, walking in, and the agencies that work at your level.

Work you have already done counts

You have done work. It probably did not come with a payslip.

Serving in a spaza or a family business. Running the till at a school tuck shop. Fixing phones for people in your street. Keeping the books for a stokvel. Volunteering at a church, a crèche, a clinic or a sports club. Six weeks of casual work over December. A learner driver's licence. A computer course. Matric subjects that match the job, like Accounting for a stock clerk role or Mathematical Literacy for a cashier.

Write each one as a line with a date range, a place and what you were responsible for. For example: "Cashier, family spaza, Khayelitsha, Jan 2025 to date. Handled cash daily, counted stock weekly, opened the shop on my own on Saturdays."

That is experience, payslip or not. Put it on your CV the way you would put a paid job.

Do not invent employers. References and work history can be checked, and being caught can cost you the job you were about to get.

Sectors that train people from scratch

Some sectors take on people with no formal work history and train them on the job.

Retail is the obvious one: general assistants, trolley collectors, merchandisers, cashiers. Under the wholesale and retail minimum rates gazetted on 3 February 2026, a general assistant in an Area A municipality has a minimum of R30,23 an hour, the same as the national minimum wage, and a cashier's minimum is a little higher. Ask stores about seasonal intakes, for example ahead of December.

Contact centres often assess literacy, numeracy and how you sound on the phone rather than what you did before, and some train new staff on their own systems. Before you accept, ask about the training period, the targets and the shifts.

General and warehouse work is open to beginners too. Before you answer a WhatsApp message about a warehouse job in Isando, or anywhere else, read how to tell whether a job advert is real.

Security is open too, but it has a gate on it. You need PSIRA registration and training before you may work, and that costs money upfront, so know that before you commit.

Where to apply without spending data

SA Youth is the place to start. MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, Telkom and Virgin Mobile have made sayouth.mobi free to use, so browsing and applying there should not use your data. The site lists its own caveats: the first time you use it, it may use 1 to 5 MB of data; some networks need a small data balance on your phone to load zero-rated sites; and a job that sends you to another website uses data there. Register once, properly, with your ID number and your real contact details.

The Public Service Vacancy Circular comes next. It is published every week except in December, free, at dpsa.gov.za, and it carries vacant posts in public service departments. The Z83 application form is on the same page.

WhatsApp job groups can be useful. On 12 February 2025 The Citizen put the number at an estimated 850 groups across the country, some with thousands of members, run by volunteers who charge nothing. Join two or three for your area rather than twenty, and mute them, or they will eat your battery and your attention. The fee test in how to tell whether a job advert is real applies inside a group exactly as it does anywhere else.

Walking in can still work in retail, hospitality, security and warehousing. Go mid-morning on a weekday with one clean page, ask for the manager, and write down the name of whoever takes it.

Your first CV, on one page

We suggest one page for a first CV. It is a recommendation, not a rule, but you probably do not have two pages of content yet, and padding shows.

Put it in this order:

1. Your name, your cellphone number, your email address and the town you live in.
2. Two lines on what work you are looking for and what you can do.
3. Your work and unpaid work, most recent first, with dates.
4. Matric or your highest level of school, with the year and the school.
5. Anything with a certificate attached, including a driver's licence and its code.
6. Two references, whose permission you have already asked for.

You do not need a street address on it. A cellphone number, an email address and a town are enough for a first contact.

Save it as a PDF, name the file with your own name, and keep it under a megabyte so it opens on a manager's phone. How to write a CV for a South African job goes through the order and the reasons in full.

What to say when they ask why they should hire you

Do not answer with adjectives. Hard-working and passionate are said so often that they tell an employer very little.

Answer with a fact and what came of it:

• "I opened the shop alone on Saturdays for a year and the float balanced every week."
• "I did the stock count for my uncle's business and found the shortage that had been running for three months."
• "I have never been late for the 5am shift, because I take the 4:10 taxi and I know the driver."

If you have nothing like that yet, say the true thing plainly. You have not done this job before, you learn fast when someone shows you once, and here is a specific example of you learning something fast. That answer beats confidence you cannot back up.

Programmes that are a real route in

A learnership is a registered agreement under the Skills Development Act between you, an employer and an accredited skills development provider. If you were not already employed there, the employer must give you a contract of employment for its duration. It pays an allowance with a gazetted weekly minimum, and it leads to a registered qualification. An apprenticeship is a learnership in a listed trade, and it includes a trade test. The Act does not define an internship the way it defines those two, although workplace-based learning regulations do recognise several kinds of internship. The difference decides what you are paid and what you hold at the end, and it is worth ten minutes: learnership, internship, apprenticeship or graduate programme.

YES, the Youth Employment Service, works with businesses to create twelve-month jobs for young people, paid by the sponsoring business. YES does not recruit young people itself: businesses recruit through their own processes, through SA Youth, or through YES's implementation partners. So register on SA Youth, and check yes4youth.co.za for how the programme works now.

Expanded public works programme work has a lower gazetted minimum: R16,62 an hour from 1 March 2026, against the general R30,23. It is not a career, but it is work you can put on a CV, with dates.

One programme to be careful about

The Basic Education Employment Initiative, which placed assistants in schools, concluded Phase V on 30 November 2025. At a close-out meeting in March 2026 the Department of Basic Education said a Phase VI would follow, but it gave no dates. Some sites advertise a new phase as open anyway. When we checked on 19 September 2026 we found no official Phase VI application window. Phase V applications ran through SA Youth, so watch sayouth.mobi and the Department's own announcements rather than aggregator sites.

What not to pay for

Do not pay anything to get a job. A registration fee, a placement fee, an admin fee or a refundable deposit to get onto a list turns up often in scams. The Employment Services Act generally prohibits charging a work seeker a fee for employment services, with a narrow transitional exception. Do not pay a recruitment agency to find you work explains that exception, and who actually pays an agency.

Certified copies are free at a police station, and the Z83, SA Youth and the vacancy circular are all free.

Paying for help with your CV is up to you. You do not need a paid professional service to write a clear first-job CV, and the one page above is the template.

The cost the hiring side may not see

There is no good answer here to the transport problem. A candidate can miss a second interview in Sandton because the taxi fare was the food money, and a consultant working to a client's deadline may have moved on to the next name before anyone asks why.

What you can do is ask. Ask for the first round by phone or video. Ask whether the interviews can be grouped on one day. Ask for the actual start date before you spend money getting there. Some employers say no. Enough say yes that the question is worth the awkwardness.

Stats SA put the official unemployment rate at 33,6% in the second quarter of 2026, in figures released on 11 August 2026. It counted about 10,4 million young people aged 15 to 24, of whom 36,4% were not in employment, education or training. If that is you, you are far from alone. What tends to help is unglamorous: registering where it is free, applying where the work is, and having one clean page ready when somebody asks.

Entry-level jobs on Recruit 360→