Career Change Resumes That Sell

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Career change resumes are are different from conventional resumes. If you're an aspiring career changer you need to write resumes that cover your transferable skills with the right resume format. Compared to writing chronological resumes for applicants with steady career path writing career change resumes require much more efforts.

In a competitive field, your application letter has to compete with cover letters and resumes of the industry's incumbents. The biggest challenge is how to convince hiring managers to call you for an interview while job seekers from the same industry are hard enough to get noticed.

Finding out what the prospective employer want from employees is your first step. You may want to research many job openings and network with people in the industry to understand critical qualities required for the new field.

Once you know the qualities searched by the company you may dig up your transferable skills. Transferable skills are skills developed in previous career but are still applicable to a new career. For example, an engineer may apply problem solving skills in a management career.

And lastly, write a resume for career change with the right resume format. How should you write such a resume? Here's how...

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Functional Career Change Resume

Compared to chronological resumes, that display relevant work experience, a functional resume focus on smoothing over gaps in your work history. If you want to apply for a job but have no work experience instead of chronologically listing your work history you'll list them by functional skills. These skills should be the abilities that are applicable across any field or industry.

You may want to start writing your resume with a career goal or a qualification summary, which is your most relevant credentials for the new career. You may write a separate job objective but you can also use concise sentences by incorporating your resume objective into your qualification summary. The following qualification summary is an example:

Result and team oriented accountant, skilled in all aspects of client management within Fortune 500 corporations' environments.

Now, develop a qualification summary based on your understanding of employer needs and then write highlights for every transferable skill group. Finally, at the bottom of your resume you may expose your work history in a simple and clear listing.

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Combination Career Change Resume

A combination resume is a chronological resume with a qualification summary lead. In a situation where your transferable skills can easily match the new career, combination resume is your best resume format because this format allows you to demonstrate your most relevant skills first as well as satisfy the needs of hiring managers for your work history.

By displaying your important qualifications at the top of your career change resume you'll entice recruiters to read further. As with functional resume, you may incorporate your career objective, key skills, major accomplishments, and relevant training into the qualification summary.

You then write your accomplishment section in several bulleted concise sentences since most of the space has been occupied by the qualification summary. At the professional experience section creates a chronological history of your experience along with a brief summation of your responsibilities. And in the last section you may add relevant training and education.



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