The Best Extracurricular Activities to Put on CV

Looking to get an edge over that faceless mass of competition out there? Or maybe, to be very honest, your CV is a little on the scant side? Extracurricular activities aren’t just padding, done right they can be an invaluable addition to any CV.

This article will show you which extracurricular activities to put on your CV. Read on to see a winning non-student CV that uses just such activities and learn how you can do the same with yours.

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Sample CV with extracurricular activities

Extracurricular activities are activities that are somehow related to a given curriculum of school but at the same time fall outside of it. 

People often ask for extracurricular activity examples for a job application, but any answer will depend on the given job application and what was actually done during those extracurricular activities. Here’s what you have to remember:

• Any extracurricular activities you put on a CV have to be directly relevant to the job at hand—this means you’ll be swapping them out from application to application.
• Your extracurricular activities have to be real—no exaggerating or embellishing.
• It’s always better if you can offer measurable outcomes associated with your extracurricular activities—an answer to the question: what did you achieve?

Now, let’s cover some basic types of extracurricular activities.

1. Performing and speaking in public

Anything from performing in an improv theatre troupe through to taking part in debating competitions. These extracurricular activities are attractive to employers because they speak to a confidence and ability to communicate that not everybody has. These are useful for jobs that involve:

• Meetings
• Presentations
• Contact with customers
• Coordinating people
• Giving instructions
• Making announcements

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2. Teaching, tutoring and training people

This could mean teaching classes of elderly people how to use email and browse the web or being part of a peer-tutoring programme, even an informal one. Anything where you regularly meet with strangers and help them grasp new information and/or skills. These show an aptitude for jobs that involve:

• Training people
• Mentoring people
• Giving instructions over the phone
• Preparing written instructions
• Patiently troubleshooting people’s IT and other issues
• Coaching
• Giving feedback

3. Volunteer work and fundraising

Volunteer work is too broad a category to cover properly. It encompasses every possible job, just minus the pay packet. This, incidentally, is often a huge plus for employers: volunteer work shows that you’re passionate enough about something to put in the hard work without being financially compensated for it.

Fundraising, though, is something we can discuss more sensibly. It shows that you have an entrepreneurial skill-set, a sense of ethics (in dealing with money), an awareness of marketing principles even if only informally, perhaps even a sense of taxation and legal principles. Relevant to jobs that involve:

• Selling
• Advertising
• Marketing
• PR
• Handling money
• Motivating people
• Persuading people

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4. Learning, teaching and speaking foreign languages

Learning a language has some very positive implications for employers—e.g., it suggests that you’re not afraid of putting in a lot of effort over a long period of time, that you’re OK with making mistakes and learning from them, and that you’re open to new experiences.

But the ability of speaking a foreign language or languages is itself extremely valuable on the job market, across an incredibly wide range of industries and job types. Even if you simply grew up bilingual through no great effort on your part, your language skills are a huge boon to your job-seeking endeavours.

There’s no shortage of studies showing the cognitive benefits of speaking more than one language, but learning a second or subsequent language can be associated with empathy and intercultural communicative competence— invaluable assets in any job that involves interactions with people.

5. Sports and hobbies

These are two more extremely broad categories of extracurricular activities. Both sports and hobbies can be extremely useful additions to your CV, but they have to be handled with caution. The main thing to consider is whether a given sport or hobby is clearly and directly relevant to the job at hand.

If it is, then it can show a huge range of skills, attributes, and aptitudes. The more specific and direct the link, though, the better. For example, if you’re applying for an entry level IT job, the fact that you enjoy playing PC games is not relevant in any obvious or direct way. Modifying PC games, though, is.

6. Student life activities

Then there are the more literal extracurricular activities, those that are directly related to student life but not part of the curriculum. These include participation in clubs, societies, and organisations, being a part of a student council, and studying abroad (even though it most often is part of the curriculum).

Such extracurricular activities on your CV show that you have a track record of getting involved and even rolling up your sleeves and going above and beyond. This is going to be useful when applying to the vast majority of jobs. Digging deeper into each activity you’ll find a range of more job-specific skills in action.

How to include extracurricular activities in your CV

There are two main ways in which you could write your extracurricular activities for your CV: as brief point-form notes or as more developed and quantified bullet points. See the examples below for a comparison of the two. 

When writing your extracurricular activities out like achievements, try to put numbers to every significant aspect. The second bullet point in the achievements version goes a step further and puts numbers to the benefits that flowed from the extracurricular activity. You can see how compelling this is.

If you decide to write extracurricular activities up like achievements, then consider using accomplishment statements to structure your sentences. This is similar to how you should be writing job descriptions for your work experience section. That answers the question of how, but what about where?

Where should you put extracurricular activities in a CV? Brief versions can go in their own, additional sections—for example ‘hobbies’. 

Putting extracurricular activities on a CV

Achievement versions can go into your work experience section (especially if you don’t have much paid work experience) or into their own additional sections.

Extracurricular activities examples for a job application

And here’s how to add extracurricular activities into your education section.

Education on a CV: extracurricular activities

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I hope this answers some of your questions regarding extracurricular activities in a CV! Have any questions, comments or experiences to share? Please leave them down in the comments section below.

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Our editorial team has reviewed this article for compliance with Livecareer’s editorial guidelines. It’s to ensure that our expert advice and recommendations are consistent across all our career guides and align with current CV and cover letter writing standards and trends. We’re trusted by over 10 million job seekers, supporting them on their way to finding their dream job. Each article is preceded by research and scrutiny to ensure our content responds to current market trends and demand.