Career Change Resume
Resume writing
can be tricky at the best of times, but what if you are changing
career? Creating an effective
career change resume is a big challenge.When all of your work
experience relates to a different field from the one you want to
get in to, creating a resume which will convince an employer you
are the right person for the job is tough.
So, how do
you write a professional resume aimed at an area you've never worked
in before?
The answer is
that you write a skills based resume, ,that is, ,you don't list your
jobs in chronological order as you would do if you were looking for
something similar to your present post. Instead, when you are creating
a career change resume, you need to focus on what you can offer the
employer, rather than on your previous jobs.
Of course, some
of the skills and experience gained in your previous jobs will be highly
relevant to the new position, but it's up to you to extract that information
and present it in a way which shows the employer right away that you
can do the job.
The first step
is to read the job description and determine exactly what the employers
are looking for. Make a list of the main skills and experience they
are after and focus on the essentials first. Now you need to match these
skills with your own and you need to find experience which is similar.
If you have
any problems with this, you should think about why they are asking for
certain experiences. Some will be obvious - if they want you to be able
to use a certain software program, that's a skill you need. However,
if they want someone who is a good team player, there are many different
situations in which you could have gained the necessary skills.
Find the most
important skills and create 3 or 4 headings which cover them all. Under
each heading give an example of several related skills. So for example,
using the heading Communication Skills, you could use written communication
such as report writing, presentations given to groups of people and
one to one oral communications as three examples. Be as detailed as
you can in the examples and give numbers and percentages if you can.
If you have
relevant work experience, you can use that as another heading and list
the jobs which relate to the new post. Otherwise, you can have a brief
list of employers towards the end of your resume.
The important
thing is to identify what the employer wants and make sure you give
plenty of strong examples at the top of the page or on the first page
if you create a 2 page resume.
Writing a career
change resume takes a bit of thought but it is not difficult if you
follow this system.