If you are a career changer, it can be a daunting experience to understand just where exactly you should start this…well, career change. It’s my firm belief that ideally, a solid first step is for you to identify and then demonstrate key transferable skills as a career changer on your resume. Start telling your new story to the audience to better position yourself towards these new roles.
What To Consider
Think of items you’ve learned or understand, and start to massage these skills into your new resume. It’s literally all you got if you haven’t initiated the education or free experiential learning components. However, do not write the actual resume yet. Start with making a list.
Research, Research, Research
First, I would study the job description in full detail and see what pairs up with what you’ve been doing. Start with the easy ones — project management (we all have a project!), research and analysis (we’re all on Google, and then leverage what we found for decision-making), or maybe cross-functional communications (we all talk to different people from all over this planet, and when we do, we are trying to identify or relate with them during the conversation to make it more collaborative). See, there’s a handful there.
Leverage LinkedIn
Your best bet is to head over to LinkedIn, find some people doing what you want to do, click on their profile, scroll down to “Endorsements,” and write out each one on your spreadsheet. Do this with 5, 10, 15, 20, whatever amount until you can honestly find some that resonate. From there, work on implementing them into your resume for more impact. Leverage them into business quantifiable statements.
What Are Business Quantifiable Statements?
I like thinking about business quantifiers no matter the role, industry, or location. These “business quantifiers” or “business qualifiers” are essentially your ability to make an impact on the employer’s bottom-line, again no matter your title. You either make them money, or cost them. You’re offering value to them in the form of an accomplishment. Even step further, this must be a transferable accomplishment or skill. Remembering this qualifier is meant to excite the hiring manager or recruiter into the caliber of candidate you are, as well as your ability to hit the ground running with your targeted job. Here are some examples you can try to match with your duties. Each duty you perform, go through and see if you can tack it onto one of these:
- Streamlining operational efficiency
- Cutting costs
- Achieving cost-savings
- Enhancing resource allocation/utilization
- Saving time
- Securing revenue gains
- Maximizing profitability
- Optimizing productivity
- Reducing discrepancy volume
- Automating workflow
- Improving throughput
- Mitigating regulatory risks by ensuring compliance
- Diminishing liabilities by sustaining patient safety
- Improving performance by training staff
- Providing support to reduce staff burdens
- Acquiring and retaining client by driving satisfaction
- Reducing waste
- Implementing process improvements
- Revamping programs
- Transforming operations
- Leading change implementation
- Strengthening traceability or transparency
- Maintaining quality
- Expediting time-to-market
- Monitoring on-time deliverables
- Reducing logistical disruption
- Improving capabilities
- Advancing shared organizational goals
- Cross-functionally communicating to share insights
- Increasing capacity
- Translating technical information to simplify content understanding
- Removing bottlenecks
- Expanding outreach to build visibility, brand awareness and exposure
- Reducing variability
- Accelerating goal attainment
- Cultivating community relations
- Gaining stakeholder buy-in
- Integrating processes
- Managing projects from concept through on-time, within-budget execution
- Reducing shrink
- Minimizing cycle times
- Securing ROI
- Releasing processing capacity
As you can probably tell, there are hundreds of these. Use them. Incorporate them correctly. Do not try to reuse them throughout the same resume. Mix it up. If one of your tasks can get converted into one of these business multipliers, you’ve done your job correctly.
Honing In On Key Information
You’ve improved your content, enabled the readers to see you are thinking about their money and eliminated redundancies! Think all you did was shuffle paperwork around for the big wigs? Not anymore. Now you “strengthened traceability by producing and sharing reports with stakeholders to help with informed executive decision-making,” or “automated workflow by managing stakeholder document control for improved data tracking, sharing and retrieval.”
Wrapping It Up
See? Doesn’t that sound better. Now go do that for EACH AND EVERY line of dialogue on your resume. Make each word count, like a screenplay. No fillers. Your livelihood’s at stake and your competition’s resume is already on PAR.
Make sure you learn the job, industry and your function within the industry/ Ask the whys? Acquire knowledge of it inside and out, ask experts, get a mentor, study news, study companies, network with industry members, join associations, read, become an expert so you can offer value.
