Welcome to the ResumePower Blog! Kim Isaacs and Karen Hofferber offer real world, proven advice on
resume writing, cover letters, career change, and job search strategies.
Resume Writing Tip: Return to a Former Career
Stand out from the crowd, even if your career has taken an unwanted turn!
Are you unhappy in your current job and wishing you can return to a former career? Chances are, you can!
You might feel like you’ve been out of your field for so long, you wouldn’t be desirable. But there are resume and cover letter strategies you can use to make a seamless transition back to the career you loved.
Follow these tips, and please post a comment if you have other strategies that have worked for you:
Resume Tips
- Lead with a bold headline or title section that clearly states your new goal.
- Write a Qualifications Summary that emphasizes your strongest credentials related to your former career field.
- Include a Key Skills section that highlights skills related to your previous career.
- Rearrange your work history so that you lead with your former, related employment. You can rename sections as appropriate (such as “Management Experience”) so it’s clear you’re grouping work history based on type of work and not chronologically.
- Emphasize recent training or activities related to your previous career to show that you’ve kept your skills up to date.
Cover Letter Tips
- Explain your decision to return to a former career. Hiring managers will be wondering why you’re doing this, and this is a perfect chance for you to express your passion for your previous career path.
- Reference accomplishments from your earlier career so employers see that you excelled in this field.
- Give examples of how you’ve been keeping your skills refreshed.
Speaking of keeping your skills refreshed, it’s very important to do this! The best way to keep your skills updated depends on your specific career field, but options include taking a class, attending conferences, participating in networking groups, practicing your skills on a freelance basis, volunteering, and keeping abreast of industry changes and trends.
Can you think of other ways to refresh your skills to prepare for a return to a former career?
Best wishes,
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Intriguing post. You highlight what amounts to a dilemma in the world of resumes, which is: In a business world in which much of the resume-writing advice says to write a “reverse chronological” resume, with your current or most recent work at the top, can a different approach - such as the one you recommend here, more of a “functional” resume - grab a hiring manager’s attention quickly?
In other words, if you were a hiring manager and saw a resume that was built based on what you recommend, would that trigger some skepticism?
My solution: Make sure your cover letter spells this out and prepares the hiring manager for what he or she is about to see on the resume. That can (but not necessarily will) diminish the chance that the resume will be met with skepticism.
Hi Rick - Thank you for your feedback and great points! But not all employers read the cover letter first (although that would definitely make things easier!). If the resume is briefly skimmed first and the job seeker’s relevant experience is buried in the resume, the cover letter and the whole application package is likely to hit the “circular” file.
You’re right — it is a dilemma, but my vote is for pulling the relevant experience to the forefront of the resume (that doesn’t make it a functional format), and drawing hiring managers in with accomplishments in these positions. The other option is to stick with the traditional reverse chronological work history, and emphasize transferable skills and achievements — but this only works for people who aren’t making a drastic career change.
Thanks again for sharing your views!
Best,
Kim
Great post. It is so important for individuals to understand the purpose of the resume…and then let that purpose direct how the resume is presented. There are too many formulas for resume preparation and not enough original thought put into them.
I recently advertised a position and received over 100 resumes online. The quality ranged from amazingly horrendous to pretty darn good. But only a handful actually put thought into preparing the resume. Several were generic in nature, and many appeared to be for entirely different fields of work (some even stated so).
Anyway, I also agree with Rick’s comment. Letting the hiring manager know why the resume is formatted in that fashion will show that you put thought into the presentation, and minimize his or her chance of dismissing the resume because it is not traditional in style.
Hi Coryan - Thanks for your comments — it’s great to hear how resumes work from a hiring manager’s perspective. The advice to target the resume and actually put thought into the content is excellent. Generic resumes are usually ineffective and make the employer’s job more difficult.
Best wishes,
Kim