Shaking It Up- Changing Industry or Role in your next career move
It’s not exactly headline news that the job market at the moment is tough. In fact, if the statistics are to be believed, 1 in five of the people reading this article on Linkedin are out of work. In the current climate more and more job-seekers are looking to change the role they’ve performed for years, or the industry in which they work, either out of necessity (for the simple fact they can’t find work in their sector) or because they’ve become disillusioned in some way with their present situation. I’ve written previous articles on how to make your CV attractive to prospective employers, however sometimes marketing your CV for a totally different role or industry can seem a daunting, often impossible endeavor. So how do you go about presenting yourself as a viable prospective employee for a role which you’ve not performed?
So how do you go about presenting yourself as a viable prospective employee for a role which you’ve not performed?
I’ll start with a story. A friend of mine recently reached out to me, we’ll call her Carol. Carol graduated from one of the USA’s most prestigious universities with a Bachelor of Science in Operations and Industry. She went on to gain a Masters in Educational Media and quickly found a job as a school librarian in a public school in America. Soon after she moved to a private school in the same role, in the UAE. Fast forward 5 years and Carol’s moved back to the US and is looking for work. The thing is, Carol was finding it hard to get a librarian’s job, so she approached me about revising her CV so that she could apply to PA and Executive Assistant roles, or perhaps something in Operations.
The truth is EVERYONE has marketable and transferable skills
I know what you’re thinking. ‘How can you possibly go from being a school librarian for 6 years, to a totally different role?” The truth is EVERYONE has marketable and transferable skills, what sets two professional profiles apart is how these are presented in your CV. Let’s look at the PA role Carol was applying to. A good PA is hard to find; they have to be demonstrably organized, personable, an excellent communicator, possess multi tasking capabilities and be able to disseminate important information.
Trust me, if you can effectively communicate with a class full of kids, you can certainly emulate that in a corporate environment.
So where could Carol add value to the PA job? For a start she is a demonstrably good communicator; Carol teaches and manages classes of kids from 10 to 17 years old on a daily basis, making sure they achieve their weekly, term-based and yearly learning objectives. Trust me, if you can effectively communicate with a class full of kids, you can certainly emulate that in a corporate environment. Carol was heavily involved in the budget, organization and administration in the library too. She had to organize stock; ordering fiction literature based on trends she had to analyze, making sure she communicated with department heads to keep the school’s text book quota up to scratch. In short, Carol was in charge of everything in her sphere of influence from the carpets on the floors, to the computers on the desks, to recruiting and managing two assistants.
The point I’m trying to make here, is that everyone has potentially transferable skills that can be effectively marketed to help them fit in to a new role; and I’m not just talking about playing lip service to job descriptions. The key is making sure that if you’re going to apply to a different role or industry, that you make your CV bespoke for the job which you’re applying. After carefully reading the job description which had been advertised, Carol identified several key areas where the client was looking for demonstrated skills. Suddenly she was a much stronger candidate for the role than ‘just’ being a librarian: Carol’s ability to present complex information in a concise format (learnt from the presentations she’d deliver to her kids in lessons), communication skills (from teaching) and organizational acumen (from running a freaking school library for goodness sake) got her that PA job.
Raiph is a Principal Talent Acquisition & HR Consultant for Kershaw Leonard in Dubai, UAE. He primarily writes on HR, Staffing & Recruitment topics. Reach him at [email protected]