The Career Changing Resume
To write a career changing resume, you need to look at how dramatic your career change is going to be. This is important because the style, the content, and how you emphasize your experience and accomplishments are ruled by what you’re trying to aim your resume toward.
Major Shift
When aiming your resume toward a major shift, you’ll need to use a functional style. If, for example, you’re a high school teacher who’s decided to become a corporate trainer, you won’t want to emphasize your employment history. Instead, you’ll want to bring attention to your transferable teaching skills.
Warning! You should send your functional style resume directly to the line manager and NOT to the recruiter’s desk. Recruiters don’t like functional style resumes for 2 reasons:
1. They’re hard to analyze against job descriptions because the data is not in the usual places.
2. They raise red flags like, “Hey, this must be a career changer.” The resume screener’s job is to screen out resumes and pull in only those candidates who won’t “waste” the line manager’s time. Sounds harsh, I know, but that’s how they see career changers.
Besides, you shouldn’t be relying solely on recruiters to screen you in or out no matter what you’re aiming toward – a career change or not. You should be focusing your strategy on getting to the person who has the power to hire you – not trying to reach HR through the major job boards.
Few Degrees of Change
On the other hand, let’s say you’re a person who sells computer chips for a computer chip manufacturer, but you’re interested in working in sales for a company that makes refrigeration equipment for the restaurant industry. That’s only a few degrees of change.
You’ll be fine with a combination style resume. You might even be able to use a kicked up version of the traditional chronological style of resume… as long as you build in a good summary of your qualifications at the top. The combined resume blends the familiar features of the chronological style with the nifty marketing-like elements of the functional style.
The secret to aiming your resume toward the few degrees of change described above is to simply eliminate the chip industry jargon and show your knowledge of the manufacturing industry in general. But, keep in mind, the more degrees of change, the more creative you need to be.
Your Masterpiece Is Only One Piece
You know, of course, that your successful career change isn’t all about how wonderful your resume is. You gotta have one, and it’s gotta be good. But even if it’s a masterpiece, it’s only one piece of the picture. Finding a great job in a new career will only happen if you have a good, solid strategy. Career change especially demands that you do a proactive – not a reactive job search. This is mainly why career changing is such a challenge, yet when you finally make it… it’s oh so sweet!
Happy Hunting!
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