Resume Digest Blog

On average people change careers two or three times in their lifetime. How do you manage to re-appear in the workforce with a new set of skills?

Transferrable skills are the abilities you have gathered along the way in a given industry and can leverage somewhere else. For example any customer facing position or sales representative role can be readily applied from one industry to another. You have demonstrated you have a track record of dealing with people. Just add product knowledge.

Sometimes knowledge is not enough. An accountant is not qualified to teach accounting. Why? Everything is becoming standardised and key performance indicators (KPIs) are being used to rate and scale everybody's performance. Nothing is left to chance. Employers will not trust your creativity or adaptability at face value even though that's what they seem to ask for in the job description!

Few accountants want to teach accounting by the way unless they are starving and are prepared to take a pay cut. If they were they would need some teaching qualifications.

So it seems the formula for a career switch is the ability to repackage your transferrable skills and taking some night or part-time course to fill-in on the missing qualifications.

People used to joke that teachers were those who could not make it in the real world. Instead they convinced themselves they liked school so much. So they became a professor.

Large companies are very much risk adverse and everything has to be done by the rule book. An alternative is the hidden job market of positions that never get advertised. Small companies like to do everything in-house and they'd rather fill a position internally rather than calling a recruitment agency. Filling a position internally means introducing the friend of an employee to the boss. Talk to people you meet at dinner parties and figure out if there might be some openings at their place of work. Do not rush-in in giving a resume. You need to qualify first what the position is. Sometimes it is a new position and the requirements can be somewhat elastic.

Take your contact out to lunch and figure out as much as you can about their place of employment. Do your research about the company so that you look knowledgeable when the interview comes. You need to roll out a custom written version of your resume specifically to address all the issues you have been told about. Getting introduced by an insider doesn't mean you can be careless about highlighting in your background what is most relevant for the role.

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