Writing a CV for a Career Change

What the employer is actually worried about

Somebody reading a career change CV has three questions in their head, and your document has to answer all three before they reach the bottom of page one.

• Can you do the job? You have no track record in it, so they are looking for the nearest thing.
• Will you stay? A change of field can read as restlessness, or as somebody who will leave again once the novelty passes.
• Will you accept the level? If you are coming in below where you were, they want to know you have made peace with that before they interview you.

Almost every decision below comes back to one of those three. If something on your CV does not help answer one of them, it is taking up room.

Keep it in date order

The usual advice for a career change is a functional or skills-based CV, where you group everything under skill headings and push the dates to the back. I would avoid it, for two reasons.

Recruiters know exactly what that format is for, and their first assumption is that something is being hidden. The layout that was meant to help you now costs you the benefit of the doubt.

It also parses badly. Screening software works by tying an achievement to an employer and a date, and a functional CV deliberately breaks that link, so your experience can end up in the database attached to nothing. There is more on this in the formatting guide.

Reverse chronological, same as everyone else. The change gets explained in the profile and demonstrated in the bullets.

The profile has to carry the change

State the change in the first line. Do not make the reader work it out from the dates, because they will not try.

The second version does three things at once. It names the destination, it points at the parts of teaching that map onto it, and the CIPD line answers the question about whether the person is serious.

Evidence of commitment matters more here than in a normal CV. A course you are part way through, a certificate, a volunteer role in the new field, a side project. Any of them shows the change started before the job application did.

Transferable skills that survive scrutiny

Most transferable skills lists are useless because they stop at the abstract noun. "Communication" is a word that could be applied to any job anybody has ever held, so a reader skips straight past it. The specific version underneath is what carries.

Work backwards rather than forwards. It is faster and the results are better.

1. Pull up four or five real adverts for the roles you want.
2. List every requirement that repeats across them.
3. For each one, find the closest thing you have actually done, and write down the specific example rather than the category.
4. Anything you cannot answer is either a gap to close with a course, or a sign the target role is a step too far for now.

Rewriting bullets for a new audience

Your old bullets were written for people in your old field, who understood the shorthand. The new reader does not. Same jobs, different emphasis, plainer language.

Strip out jargon that only means something inside your old field, and keep the parts that show scale, responsibility and consequence.

Level, money and being realistic

A change of field often means a step back in seniority for a year or two. Pretending otherwise on the CV tends to produce interviews that go nowhere and offers that never come.

• Do not put salary expectations on the CV. That conversation belongs later, and putting a number on the page only gives somebody a reason to rule you out early.
• Do not inflate your target. Applying for senior roles in a field you have not worked in wastes the applications. One rung down, with a plan to move quickly, is usually faster overall.
• If you are willing to take a step back, say so in the cover letter rather than the CV. It removes a worry the reader would otherwise sit on.

If you are hedging between two directions

Plenty of people changing career are weighing up two different destinations at once, and try to write one CV that works for both. It does not work. What comes out is too general to convince anybody in either direction.

Write two, and keep them properly separate. Same history, different profile, different skills order, different emphasis in the bullets. It is an hour of work the first time and about ten minutes per application afterwards.

A cover letter is worth writing for every career change application, because it is the only place the reasoning fits. The cover letter guide covers what to put in it.