Chart your Value

http://www.youtern.com/thesavvyintern/index.php/2012/11/27/can-you-answer-this-question-why-should-i-hire-you/

Here's an especially good "hands-on" blog post that shows you how to translate your experience into strong selling points to a prospective employer--even if you don't think you have "experience."

Use a template to list all the things you have done... soup to nuts, like community service, earning good grades, club participation and leadership, sports. Notice that none of these activities are likely to be ones where you got paid to do something.

Then, list all the skills and employable qualities you can attach to your activities. You can find more ideas and examples of how this works at the blog posting. 

Of course, paid work is the gold standard of proving you have successfully met the challenges and gained the skills you will need to impress an employer--you can be fired from paid work if you don't meet or exceed expectations. 

But don't ignore the silver standard of unpaid work. As of December 18, the price of gold was $1,669.50 per ounce, and silver was $31.60 per ounce (http://silver-and-gold-prices.goldprice.org/). If you're holding 55 ounces of silver... that's still worth more than an ounce of gold.