How to Write a Resume When Changing Career Fields

A functional resume is better suited to transferable skills.

Cover letters and resumes should focus on skills that are transferable between your old career and your new career. Format your resume to highlight those skills, and draw attention to your ability to apply those skills to a new work environment. The functional resume style will be more useful than one that lists your previous positions chronologically.

Instructions

1. Fold a piece of paper in half vertically. Draw a line down the middle. Write a list of skills you use in your current job on the left side. Think customer service, team management, effective and resourceful problem solving, for example.

2. Write skills pertinent to the job you want on the right side of the page. Find specific skills and education requirements in job advertisements related to your new career.

3. Highlight the skills that match on your two lists. These are transferable skills that can be used in one environment or another. For example, if you are a lead child care provider in a day care center, you use customer service skills as you interact with parents as they drop off or pick up their children. If you want to work in a retail setting, those same customer service skills will be vital in assisting customers.

4. Focus your resume on your past positions that used these skills. Group your jobs according to what types of skills you used. Provide details about what you did in each relevant position. Downplay positions that did not use these skills by not providing full job descriptions and accomplishments under each position.

References

• Quintessential Careers: Career Changers' Most Powerful Resume and Cover-Letter Tool- Transferable Skills
• Powerful-Sample-Resume-Formats: Career Change Resume Writing