How to write a resume when changing career direction

Deciding to take your career in a different direction can be exhilarating. Forging a new career path, learning new skills, taking on new challenges, making change; there are many reasons why people decide to have a change of career. Sometimes it can be forced upon us or it can be our choice, driven by different motivators and factors. Regardless of the career change reasons or the new direction you are taking, how you pitch yourself when applying for jobs aligned to your new career path can have its challenges.

What do I put on my resume? How do I show my skills when I feel like I really don’t have any relevant skills? How do I explain the career change? How do I get noticed by employers in my new chosen career path?

In today’s world of work, the resume is still often the first step in the process of applying for a job. It’s the document that has to make the right impression to get you to the next stage of the recruitment process. Most of us don’t like putting together a resume at the best of times, let alone when we have to try and write a resume when we are making a career change and feel like we don’t have anything relevant to put in that resume.

The best place to start when you are putting together your resume for a new career path is to put your resume template aside and simply start with a bit of a brainstorming session. Rather than just trying to jump straight in and write your resume, and covering letter, taking a step back and brain storming helps break the writing process in to stages or chunks and big tricky tasks are so much easier when we break them down.

The first step is to get your thoughts on paper about why you have chosen this new career path, what interests you about the new industry and/or role, what drew you to this career path, what you are excited about. Then it’s worth noting down a bit about your values and from a values perspective, what you have to offer an employer. These are things like your honesty, integrity, loyalty, commitment, reliability. This info will become content for your covering letter and the intro of your resume.

Writing a resume when we are changing career direction requires a different kind of resume template. The most common type of resume puts emphasis on our work history, demonstrating our experience and skills relevant to that same kind of role. When we are making career change, that experience (depending on how big the career change is) often becomes less relevant. Therefore, we need to shift the style of our resume to be focused on our transferable skills; the skills we have gained through not only our employment history but also our life, education, volunteering etc that transfer across industries and aren’t specific to one type of job. Transferable skills are skills such as Communication, Organisation, Time Management, Strategic Thinking, Influencing, Negotiating, Problem Solving etc. As part of your brainstorming session, getting down on paper all your transferable skills can be valuable so you can then cherry pick the transferable skills that are most relevant to your new career path and it’s these skills that become a critical part of your new resume.

Once you have identified your transferable skills, it’s time to flesh them out and demonstrate those transferable skills. One of the biggest gaps I see in any resume is when people simply state their skills. To help you stand out from the crowd there is huge value in demonstrating these skills. For example, what does communication skills actually mean and look like in your world? Being able to help paint this picture for the reader of your resume helps them get much better insight in to your level of skill and what you have to offer, rather than just listing on your resume a list of transferable skills.

The employment history section of your resume is still important when changing careers however we do want to shift the focus to the transferable skills so this section might become less of a focus. It’s still vitally important to show the roles you have had including the employer, position title and dates as well as some scope of what your responsibilities were. Wherever you can though, try and focus the work history on skills and experience that might correlate or transfer or be relevant to your new career path.

By starting with a brainstorming session, when you come to populate the different sections of your resume template you will have lots of valuable information. You can use and finesse this information in to building a resume that tells a story of your career to date but focuses on your new career direction and the transferable skills you have to bring to the table to get you started on this new path.