How to Write a Resume for Changing Careers: 10/10 Resume Tips for a Career Pivot

greetings friends today we are going to talk about the perfect 10 out of 10 resume for someone who is changing careers and I thought what better way to explain this than to just walk you through it myself with a resume that I created for someone who was changing careers let's just dive into it you can see exactly what it looks like and I'll tell you how to build one for yourself so first things first we get through sort of the introductory name and contact information and then we give ourselves a nice professional title so what

we want to do firstly is draw their attention to the industry that we are trying to get into so this resume is an example of someone who wants to get into HR and they just sort of have a sales and managerial background we see people transitioning careers all the time A lot of people are transitioning these days into Tech from something non-technical lots of career changes happen every single day right you can do this let me let me walk you through um so HR so the first thing we're going to do in a professional title

whereas in other resumes we might want to tell them about what we do in this one we're going to first tell them that we are an Enthusiast of the industry that we are looking to get into we want to just say that industry name right away if we don't work in it already Enthusiast is the best we're going to be able to do and it's a strong word uh then we'll give ourselves as we usually do a couple of other titles because we are working in other areas we can just sort of focus on our

sort of soft skills or our leadership skills so that's why I usually like to throw in things like these seasoned people leader developmental manager just so they know you know this is human resources we care about people so if you're going into Tech maybe we have a couple of tech related things there next under our areas of expertise this is a super important section for getting past ATS scanners because it allows us to plug in a bunch of keywords we are going to put in anything and everything we know or have experience with or have

even studied in a course related to this new industry that we want to get into so for this one because this person has some management background and has done a certificate in HR we've pulled a lot of skills and experiences from that to put in air our areas of expertise here and that is kind of how we fill out this areas of expertise section uh what your what you want to look for in terms of what to put in there is content that's going to come from the job postings that we're interested in so if

we pulled up a couple of entry-level HR job postings we'd look at what are the the functions they're talking about in these jobs what are the skills what's the industry terminology and those are the kind of things that we want to plug into areas of expertise we are also going to pick like our top three to four skills related directly to the industry we want to get into and we're going to talk about them in career highlights so you see here we just start straight up as direct as possible with human resources then we talk

about how we have eight years of experience doing people leadership and Human Resources like things so we're not necessarily saying claiming to have eight years of Human Resources experience but we want to show them we've been in in and around that world then we pick a couple of other sort of HR related things team building performance Improvement again if we before trying to get into Tech surely you've used technology in some of your past experiences so we can highlight how we've used technology in our in our roles or whatever it is we're just looking for

our most transferable skills and we're going to give them a little rundown of when we've used those skills here uh so that's career highlights again this sort of top third of the resume we're just trying to get them super excited for to read the rest of our resume and we're also trying to make it clear that we are very interested we're not just applying to this other um new career path because we hate what we're doing now we want to make it abundantly clear this is a very intentional shift another way we do that and

probably the most important way to do that is to show that we've taken some sort of Education some sort of training focused on this new career it's very hard to move from one career to something completely different if we don't demonstrate to the employer that we're already committed to making that career change through something like taking a certificate going back to school maybe even just taking some online courses the the degree of your investment in going back can vary and I'll say that the more invested you are the easier the transition usually is but at

very least some sort of nice online certificate that we can talk about and what's going to change is that for most of us when we are kind of established in our Career Education is going to be one of the last things we put in our resume however in this situation where our education and specifically this new certificate or diploma or whatever it is that we enrolled in is our best selling point and our most relevant piece of information related to the career we want to get into we are going to bump that above our professional

experience and then just like we would under professional experience we're going to put some bullet points in there as you can see here so the things that we will include bullet points under this certificate regarding professional or sorry relevant courses and we'll list everything that we took or everything that we learned in the courses that we took that's related to HR again this is a great way to work in some keywords so that we're coming up positively when our resumes go through those ATS scanners but also to just make sure that someone reading this knows

that we are familiar with these areas and we we're not going to be a complete beginner When we arrive even though this is a new career area for us another really really valuable thing to include under the education section is if you've done any major projects and we want to list these out just like a bullet point for any other job I want to get as detailed as possible talk about what was the subject matter we were covering who were we working with if possible how did it go some of these Capstone projects are competitions

where we'll get rated and maybe we get some sort of a grade or we you get a prize or something this is all great stuff to include if you've had multiple big projects or big projects maybe from each of your courses that you took we can detail each of those in a bullet point and it's really going to feel like experience for each of these jobs and you can see here I also included academic achievement so if we have like a great grade or you know performance in in this program the certificate you can mention

that as well it's a little less relevant than the projects and the courses but still good and then we get into our professional experience and just to clarify this is a one-page resume because this is an educational resume most resumes now are two pages but we'll list our job experience next and the trick here again is to focus with our top bullet points on things that are closely related to the industry we want to get into specifically if we have ever worked with people in a department that we would like to go work in so

if you've ever in this case worked with uh with our HR colleagues or in another industry if you've maybe worked with an IT team or some vendors from another company who are in the area that you want to get into that's the kind of stuff we can we can work in as bullet points even if it's less impressive accomplishments we just want to show some exposure to those Industries aside from that the bullet points should just be focused on us doing a great job so it is okay to list bullet points that aren't relevant to

your new industry if if the old jobs were not directly tied to your new industry but what we really want to do is make sure that we show them any relevant work and also that the work we did that's not relevant we just did a great job so our most impressive accomplishments that are not relevant to the work that we want to get into are also super valuable here because people like to hire High performers and then as we as we see here we kind of closed out with our technical proficiencies just using any particular

listing any particular skills or technology that we're familiar with and again highlighting those that would be relevant to the the jobs we're interested in so this my friends this is a 10 out of 10 resume for someone who is changing careers now I have a template that looks just like this that you can pick up I've linked it down below this is my highest converting resume template I call it template 3.1 because template 3 was doing well but I upgraded it a little bit to 3.1 so that's linked down below if you want your resume

to look just like this and of course follow and like this video for more because I'm putting out a ton of great job search content especially around resumes we'd love to see you in my other videos thank you