Many job seekers today are looking to make a career change, even after having built successful careers in another field. That kind of switch is challenging, and to get ahead you’ll need a strong resume that sells your skills and sets you apart from other candidates who might have more relevant experience.While it’s important to know that you are a good match for any position you’re applying for, you should always emphasize any top skills you have developed along the way at other organizations or previous positions. The ability to match these relevant skills to the position you want is invaluable. These types of transferable, or ‘portable’, skills are something employers today are increasingly looking for when reviewing candidates’ resumes and determining who the right person is for the job.According to Richard Nelson Bolles’, ‘What Color is Your Parachute’, transferable skills can be broken down into three categories: people (communicating, teaching, etc.), data (record keeping, researching, and compiling data), and things (operating computers/equipment, assembling and repairing). You can demonstrate that you’re qualified for your new career by highlighting these types of skills on your resume. If you’re implementing these keywords on your resume, recruiters can dive deeper into your resume for more details and find out more about you. Taking the time to identify and nurture these types of transferrable skills shows employers that you have what it takes to get ahead in your new career. It demonstrates the ability to be multi-faceted and adaptable to many types of jobs – something critical to today’s job seekers. In this article, we’ll offer these and other tips for the top skills to include on your resume when changing jobs. We’ll discuss how people are changing careers, and describe what it takes to display and highlight the skills that hiring managers value today.
When applying for a job in a different field, or even when applying for one in the same field, your resume should first and foremost focus on the skills, qualifications, and achievements that are most relevant to the new position or career track you want to attain. There are many great resources online to help get you started with this. If you need advice to get you started or refresh your resume, you can find that right here within the Fiverr resume section. The section offers a wide variety of services to get you on your way to producing the kind of focused resume an employer wants to see.When you update your resume, being focused means spotlighting only the elements that are needed for a particular position. Your resume should be comprehensive. You should stay focused on relevance instead of volume also; listing every position you’ve ever held or every software program you’ve ever learned is likely less important than emphasizing your commitment to the change you’re making and your ability to do whatever it takes to succeed. Listing your knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite (along with every component that comes with it) is probably not going to impress anyone. This is already common knowledge that most other applicants have as well. Time management, professional association memberships, or professional certifications are likely to be much more impressive to a hiring manager that’s looking to fill a position with a diversified, talented candidate.
Millennials and younger workers are looking for more purpose and meaning in their jobs. Millennials want to be able to establish a connection between the tasks they perform and the way those tasks impact real people and situations. And with the oldest millennials, now in their thirties, are becoming more and more a part of middle and upper management. These millennials are employing a very different communication style as compared to previous generations. Millennials tend to be technologically-savvy, and are used to being able to access information quickly from various channels and platforms. This means that transparency and increased communication is becoming more crucial to an organization, and companies will need to offer inclusive communication that gives employees a chance to be more involved in ultimately shaping their organization’s culture and environment. There is an increasing focus on soft skills as well. Soft skills are proving to be a key asset for any job seeker. Companies are looking for candidates that know how to handle various situations thrown at them – no matter how challenging – can succeed and represent the company well. While hard skills are still necessary, soft skills such as resourcefulness and the ability to adapt to different types of cultures are becoming more and more a part of what employers are looking for in candidates today.
