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How to redesign a resume for a career change
Let’s see how we can change the typical resume to help your resume rise among the submission pack.
“The reward of suffering is experience” — Harry S. Truman
Changing a career is tough. I’ve experienced it first hand when I started to look on how to change from a career in Internal Audit to a career in Data Analytics. It was a difficult experience, but I hope this article will reward my suffering with the experience I aim to share with you.
Without proof of experience a lot of employers are hesitant to even entertain an interview from a candidate looking to change careers. While initially the odds may be stacked against us, there are things we can do to tip the balance in our favor.
In this article I’ll walk through how to design your resume to ensure that all relevant information and skills related to the new job are at the center of attention. I’ll also show this with my own personal resume changes as a practical example.
The assumption I’ll start with is that you do have the necessary job skills to make the career change in the first place. If not, then you may want to start to see what key skills your new field would require. A great resource is the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor. This site has a lot of great information about different industries such as; skill requirements, job outlook, pay, etc.
You can also take a look at job postings related to your career of interest to get a feeling of what skills the job market is looking for. This helps in understanding what skills are required for the field, and find the key words you will need to write your resume. See below for an example of a job listing that I applied to :
The listing above has a lot of requirements that I can check off. Going through the listing I like to mark off all the software, hard skills, and styles of communication (and with who we need to communicate). Let’s go ahead and highlight all the requirements that I meet for the listing.
So if we break this down simply, this company is looking for someone with this kind of work summary:
An individual who can work with team members from various departments to derive and report on key business metrics. This person should have experience writing SQL queries, familiarity with Python, knowledge of basic statistic techniques, and proficient in Tableau.
Summarizing the job listing to how you are proficient will help us in writing a succinct resume. We’ve boiled down the requirements to how we best fit the role, and know how to target our resume for this very listing. Let’s take a look at the traditional resume I used to try to land a Data Analyst job (with little success).
Outside of the fancy formatting, this is a pretty basic resume. Left-hand side has all my work and educational experiences, and the right hand side contains my personal summary, contact information, and skills. The styling makes it stand out a bit, but nothing to write home about. On top of that my most recent experience and skills do not fully reflect all that I have done to learn and grow as a Data Analyst. This resume does not reflect what we wrote in the summary above. This resume would work just fine if I wanted to get another Internal Audit role, but fails to stand out to recruiters looking to hire a Data Analyst. Let’s now see the changes I made to specifically target this role, and show case my skills.
Now this is the Tesla of career change resumes. Clean, minimalistic, and fresh. For some roles, formatting and design of the resume may not be important, but if you’re reporting to multiple teams and executives, you really want to show your future employer that a well designed document is within your forte as well. A well organized and easy to read resume speaks volumes of your skills in written communication.
People tend to naturally read in what’s called the F-Shaped pattern. Starting from the top left of a content area and moving horizontally and down. This is why I organized my personal information and soft-skills (written as key skills in the resume) in a column to the left, important, but left to the side. All of my experiences sectioned off by my summary, technical skills, and experience to the right, in the bigger section with my technical skills near the top, allowing recruiters to catch on to that section before any other.
My summary doesn’t forgo my audit experience, it instead sets the tone for the rest of my resume on how my past experiences play into the role as a Data Analyst as required by the job listing. I then go straight to my technical skills. This is in stark contrast to my previous resume where my SQL, data visualization, and Python skills took a backseat in a tiny skills section. Here, they are front and center stage. I was also able to allocate a lot more page real estate to these skills to really flesh out my technical skill details. I included projects done with each skill, and what I did to go out of my way to learn these new skills. Again, I’m not shying away from the fact that I was an Internal Auditor, in fact I’m using that to boost my personal brand image by showing the recruiter that they are getting a two-for-one special! A Data Analyst who understands how business functions operate can surely provide great business insights.
My experience section remained more or less the same. I did make a few word changes for my responsibilities in my job to make it reflect more closely to the analytic work that I did. I try to punch-up my experience section to contain more of the words and actions that we highlighted in the job listing shown above. It’s an exercise in relating your current work to the job requirements. You will definitely see a lot of overlap.
There you have it, the formula for a great career change resume. From researching the skills needed, reviewing a job listing for key words, formatting your resume layout, and properly word-smithing your skills and experiences, you can craft a stellar resume. The process can be a bit tedious, but as we learned from Harry S Truman, the suffering is worth the reward of experience.
P.S. In case you were wondering, I did get the job! With the exact resume shown above :)
