Career Change Job Search Strategy and Resume Writing
Looking for secrets of the career change job search and the career change resume? When you are contemplating a career change, you certainly need to know what job you want to do. But making a change can force you to know what you want your job to do for you.
Look at yourself, your career, and your goals. Goals may change over the course of your career. You may have more of an eagerness to contribute to others. Or your personal ambition may be higher than ever. Shape your professional resume to help you stand out.
Facets of the job search remain crucial: the best resume, informational interviews, and self-reflection.
You have questions to consider:
- Do you want a chance to apply your visionary reputation or support the vision or others?
- Do you want organizational pressure?
- Do you prefer a large organization or a small one?
- How do you go about positioning yourself for the legacy you want?
You’d think that with so much at stake in this inscrutable process of the career change job search, someone must have found a way to give applicants the help they really need. There must be some readily available source of expert guidance. The truth is you need to be your own reliable adviser and set yourself on the right path.
The problem is not a lack of options. In a sense, it’s quite the opposite. Advice does not magically become useful just because it has a nice ring to it.
One practical aspect of a career change to help you implement your choice is in the career change resume. The idea is that you developed skills and reached results in your former career that are clearly transferable to your new one. If you’re moving from sales to teaching, for example, you know how to make presentations, how to persuade, how to interest your audience, how to organize material, and how to relate to all sorts of people—all things that matter in both fields.
If the skills you need now are not the ones you used in your former career, what are those skills and where did they come from? Presumably, you didn’t pick your new field at random. Did you go to school? Did you do any volunteering? Did you intern? Take a hard look at what you learned and what you achieved in those settings. Focus your resume accordingly.
An exclusively chronological resume won’t deliver the right message. Use a combination chronological and functional resume that opens with a summary of your qualifications and a clear statement of your new goals. Add a brief chronological rundown of your employment in your former field. Finally, use your cover letter to underline a convincing explanation for the big change.
LinkedIn can be a measuring stick for career changers. If you’re looking at a new field, you may not know exactly what you need to do or what your next step should be. You can find out, though, by seeing what those who have gone before you have done. If you look at the profiles of 20 project managers, and 18 of them hold PMP certifications, you’ll have a compelling indication of what matters in the field. Tying qualifications listed by the LinkedIn profile writers to actual people who are working in the real world is a lot more compelling than reading about theoretical qualifications in the abstract.
Take a look at people’s backgrounds. How did they get where they are today? Again, that’s the real world telling you what the career path is like.
Successful Career Change Requires Daring and Well Designed Job Search Strategy
Don’t fear the career change. Understand that you found jobs in the past and you’ll find one in the future. It will happen.
Weigh the benefits of the search against the cost. A well-done career change job search will elevate you to higher position and reward you for the rest of your life.
The ancient aphorist Publius Syrus said, “No one reaches a high position without daring,” and the statement is as true today as it was in the corrupt Roman Empire he lived in. The daring requires courage, but mainly against negative emotions within. You simply have to aim high, prepare thoroughly, and be willing to risk failure. The rewards are enormous and you can achieve them.