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A sample career change and six strategies job seekers can use to highlight your most in-demand skills when changing careers.
Career Change Advice For Teachers
If you’re starting a new career, there are some key questions to consider when writing your resume. You will need to change your past experience to present yourself as an ideal candidate for a new job.
How To Write A Career Change Cv: Template & Guide
Along with the career change resume sample below, you’ll also find six key strategies career changers use to write a compelling resume on this page. There is also an analysis of the career change pattern that highlights and explains the choice to make the resume an effective self-marketing tool for the career changer.
The biggest challenge for career changers when writing a resume is finding ways to present yourself as someone who is a perfect fit for your new career.
However, making such an impression can be difficult because your strongest experience is probably in your current career, not in the new career you want to start.
The standard resume structure places work experience at the beginning of the resume. If you are changing careers, you will almost always need to change this organization because you will not have paid work experience in your new career.
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Your work history won’t be your most popular experience, so it’s not what you want employers to see first when they look at your resume.
The combined resume format gives you all the flexibility you need to organize your resume entries to their maximum advantage. You’ll be able to place the skills and experience most relevant to your new career at the beginning of your resume to quickly grab the attention of employers.
Career changers should avoid using a chronological resume, as this format will make your work history stand out the most — not your biggest sale.
You should also avoid using a functional resume format because it leaves out important information that employers expect to see. Employers know that job seekers use functional resumes to hide certain issues in their work history, so most employers don’t trust a functional resume.
Teacher Career Change
Experience sections are organized by importance. Typically, work experience is a job seeker’s biggest asset, followed by education and possibly volunteering.
If you change careers, you won’t have experience in a new field. Your work history probably won’t be your most attractive experience, so it’s not the first thing you want to show employers.
Maybe you’re going back to school to earn a degree, diploma, or certificate that will help you start a new career. In this case, your education is the first experience that employers should see. This will be more relevant than your work history, so you should list education before work experience.
Similarly, you may volunteer or complete an internship to gain experience in your new career. For those changing careers, this paid work experience will be more relevant than your past paid work.
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Resumes typically don’t include much detail about education or volunteer work. But three types of job seekers can often benefit from providing detailed information about their education or volunteer work:
If you are looking for a job with an established career, the work history will be the most relevant experience for you, so the work history is detailed while the other sections of the resume contain less detail.
However, for many students, recent graduates, and career changers, education and volunteering include important experiences that should be detailed on a resume.
If your education plays an important role in your career change, be sure to describe it in detail. You can include electives you’ve completed, awards you’ve received, special projects you’ve worked on, and co-op placements or internships you’ve completed.
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If your volunteering was instrumental in preparing you for a career change, be sure to describe that experience in detail. Give as much thought and consideration to describing your volunteer experience as you would to describing your paid job.
Standard resumes for job seekers include important information about work experience. But if you’re changing careers, your past work may not be as relevant to employers in your new field.
People who are changing careers often benefit from including less detailed information about past jobs. Add bullet points about your past work to describe skills and experience relevant to your new job. Don’t spend a lot of time describing tasks or skills that are completely unrelated to your new career.
In many industries and jobs, a specific language is commonly used. You may find that your new career overlaps with your past job, but the words used to describe that job are different.
Career Change Resume Examples Designed For 2023
Adult education teachers and workshop facilitators lead groups to share information, but adult education teachers refer to the people they work with as ‘students’ and workshop facilitators refer to the people they work with as ‘clients’.
Write about your past work experience so that you can see how your skills will transfer to your new job. If similar tasks are expressed in different terms in your past career, switch to the language you would use in your new career if it is reasonable and fair.
When writing your career change resume, avoid using industry terms from your past jobs. If a word or phrase is not understood by an outsider, it should be described in more general terms.
Now that you know some basic strategies for writing a career change resume, check out these techniques in the career change resume example below.
Teacher Resume Example [w/ Free Template]
In this resume example, we have a teacher with years of experience teaching music and teaching adults. She wants to work as a careers counselor and recently earned a degree to help her achieve that goal.
A career change resume sample shows how she can structure her resume to put her biggest assets—in this case, education and internships—in front of related but less relevant work history. You’ll also see how she can carefully choose the language she uses to describe her work as a teacher so that it better relates to her new career.
Let’s look at some of the key decisions made when writing this career change resume to illustrate the reasons for this choice.
The profile is effectively used to portray this job seeker as a career consultant rather than a music teacher.
How To Write A Career Change Resume (guide, Templates, & Examples)
At the top of the CV in this section are the words ‘Career and Work Adviser’. These are the first words an employer will read. The boldness of these words helps them stand out and quickly attract the employer’s attention.
Even though this job seeker has never worked in such a position, they can use their last job in school to get relevant information.
Her profile honestly says she just graduated from a career counseling program. He doesn’t try to exaggerate his experience, but his profile still makes employers think he’s a “career advisor” rather than a “music teacher.”
The combined resume format includes a brief summary of skills, followed by experience and education. This resume format is much more flexible than a chronological resume. This gives career changers the freedom to list relevant skills and experience first, even if those skills were not developed through gainful employment.
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A summary of skills at the top of a resume is especially useful for career changers. It can be used to highlight almost any information you want to include in your resume.
The job seeker featured in this career change resume has experience teaching music to children. His new career may involve a similar assignment – conducting workshops for adult clients.
On her resume, she describes her teaching skills in terms that help employers imagine she teaches workshops for adults, not children.
This job seeker’s most marketable experience is his education and internships, so these items are listed first, before paid work experience.
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He completed two internships as part of the college program. These internships gave him valuable hands-on experience in a new industry, so he listed them in a separate section and provided detailed information about the work he did with each organization.
This advice applies to all types of job seekers, not just career changers. Note that by the time you get to the second page of this career change resume sample, the most important information has already been covered. The second page contains important but less relevant information.
If you include past work history—even if it’s not particularly relevant to your new career—you can demonstrate past responsibilities and describe experiences that apply transferable skills.
Omitting your work history can make employers nervous. They expect this information in your resume. If it’s not, they might wonder what you’re trying to hide.
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Details of past work experience should be described in terms relevant to the new job. Any bullet points you include should highlight the tasks that apply to the new job.
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