Profile
How to complete your Strive profile — and why honesty matters
Most students freeze at the same point: the profile is open, the fields are empty, and nothing feels worth writing down. No paid job. No state championship. No captaincy.
That instinct is understandable, but it is a common reason student profiles end up thin. A profile is not a highlight reel of your best three moments. It is an honest picture of who you are, what you can do, what you care about and how you have developed. Much of what you already do can contribute to that picture.
Relevant does not mean impressive
Here is the test to apply to anything you're unsure about:
Does this help explain who I am, what I can do, what I care about, or how I have grown?
If the answer is yes, it belongs in your profile. "Impressive" is not the bar. Turning up to training every week for three years might not sound impressive at first, but it says something real about you that an award never could.
What to include
Work through these areas one at a time rather than trying to remember everything at once.
Academics
Your subjects, your results, and the effort and behaviour ratings your teachers give you. Effort and behaviour matter more than people expect — an employer hiring a young person may care just as much about consistency, effort and reliability as a particular grade.
School achievements and roles
Awards, certificates, representative selection, being chosen for a team or a committee. Also the smaller roles: peer mentor, sports house point scorer, class representative, library helper.
Sport
Club or school, team or individual, competitive or social. Include how long you've been doing it. Length of commitment is its own kind of evidence.
Clubs and extracurricular activities
Debating, robotics, chess, band, choir, drama, coding club, agricultural club, cadets, environment group. If you show up regularly, it counts.
Volunteering and community involvement
Canteen shifts, sausage sizzles, working bees, coaching a junior team, church or community group activities, charity fundraising, helping at a local event.
Leadership
Not just formal titles. Running a warm-up, training a new volunteer, organising a group assignment so it actually got finished — all leadership.
Projects
School projects you were proud of, and personal ones too: a short film, a game, a garden bed, a repaired motorbike, a small online store, a mural.
Hobbies that show capability
Some hobbies genuinely demonstrate useful abilities. Building computers shows patience and problem solving. Photography shows an eye for detail and often software skills. Baking to order for family events shows planning and time management. Include the hobby, then say what it involves.
Informal responsibilities
This is the category students skip most often. Looking after younger siblings after school. Helping in a family business on weekends. Being the person at home who cooks two nights a week. Managing your own transport across town to training. These are real responsibilities and they show real reliability.
Skills built through everyday experience
Communication, teamwork, time management, cash handling, customer service, problem solving, digital skills. Add the ones you can actually point to somewhere else in your profile.
If you're still stuck on whether something belongs, read What counts as experience when you've never had a job?
Why being genuine matters more than looking good
There's a temptation to round things up. To call yourself "team captain" because you sometimes ran the warm-up. To list skills you've heard employers want but have never used.
Don't.
Three reasons, in order of how much they'll cost you:
It falls apart in conversation. An employer asks one follow-up question and the gap shows immediately. That's a far worse first impression than a modest, accurate profile.
A referee has to back it up. If you ask a teacher for a reference and your profile describes a version of you they don't recognise, you've put them in an awkward position.
It gives Strive bad material. Strive builds your professional identity and résumé from what's in your profile — including the parts your school verifies. Vague, inflated entries produce vague, generic output. Specific, honest entries produce a résumé that sounds like an actual person.
Compare these:
- Weak: "Leadership skills."
- Better: "Ran junior training drills for the under-12s at Netball club, Term 2 and 3 2026, alongside the head coach."
The second one is smaller in scope and far stronger, because it's checkable and it sounds like you.
Write it in plain language
Describe things the way you'd explain them to a relative. "I help my uncle at his mechanic shop most Saturdays" is better than "assisted in automotive service operations." Plain, specific and true is the goal.
What to do next
Fill in one section properly rather than all of them badly. Start with academics because it's quick, then do sport and activities, then sit with the informal responsibilities section for a few minutes — that's where students find the most they'd forgotten.
Once your profile has real substance in it, Strive can use it to help draft your professional summary and résumé, and teachers can add verified awards and references on top. Both work far better with an honest, complete profile underneath them.
When you're ready for the next step, read How to get your first job while you're still at school.