What to include in your CV when making a career change?
Do you remember the good old days?
Life without the internet. People visiting relatives or reading the newspaper for entertainment.
And of course, people staying in the same job for the majority of their working life and retiring after forty years with a sizeable pension.
While it is always fun to look back in the past at how we changed, the reality for 21st century Barbados is just that. It is in the past.
Technology greatly shapes our lives and the once solid forty-year employee is now a distant memory. With a booming tourism industry, ICT investment, manufacturing opportunities and a growing financial sector, it’s no surprise that many Bajans require a career changes, several times over the course of their working life.
When switching careers, your CV is your tool to market yourself, document your progress and show potential employers that you have earned the skills and capabilities they are looking for.
When is the best time to make a career change?
While there is no set ideal time to make a career change, professionals usually seek career transitions in the first half of their working lives. Flexibility is more present as younger professionals typically have fewer financial obligations and other responsibilities such as children and elderly to face.
Essentially, a career change is still possible for mature professionals, but it should be mentioned that making a career change requires sound and strategic planning.
Mistakes and failures are generally easier to overcome in the initial stages of one’s career. Leaving your current job to switch careers may also mean being without a steady income for some time. As such, you should ensure you have the resources to carry through the career transition process so as to not compromise your standard of living.
How do you write a CV for a career change?
When updating your CV for changing careers, ensure that all details are relevant and updated. Employers are looking for 21st century innovators who can adapt, bring fresh solutions and be of great value to their team. Therefore, your CV needs a modern and fresh outlook. It should signal to a recruiter that you have a solid work background and are ready and willing to take on new challenges with gusto!
When crafting your career change CV, the document must be well-structured. Hiring managers receive hundreds within a day and you don’t want to be lost in an anonymous pile. Utilise clear headings for your sections. Highlight your work experience with actionable tasks you did to deliver results and how you used your skills to get the project completed.
Within your career change CV, everything from your personal statement, to your education, work experience and even hobbies if you choose to include them must be relevant to the position you’re applying for. Leave the unnecessary details out. Hiring managers simply have no time for them!
What to include in your CV when switching careers?
Personal Information
You need to put your name, Address, date of birth, phone or email, so they can contact you.All this information has to be up to date.
Your personal statement
Your personal statement or sometimes referred to as your professional bio, is a concise yet insightful introduction into your character, ability and goals. Tell the interviewer in your personal statement who you are, which essentially is the first question they ask in an interview anyways.
Mention what skills you possess. What is your value to the organisation – technical skills, selling or data processing for example? What are your future goals? What are you looking to do by working with the company? Are you seeking to grow with them, establish a career in this field, learn more about the industry? State it clearly in your personal statement.
Educational Background
Once you’ve reached a certain level in your career, remember you can omit the unnecessary education details. Contemporary employers aren’t interested in your secondary, and to a lesser extent your primary education.
Emphasise your tertiary level qualifications under this section. For example, if you have a first degree or post-graduate qualification from UWI, Barbados Community College or a certificate from Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology, these need to be included on your CV.
The structure you must include depends on whether you have a Bachelor’s degree, diploma or certificate.
Employment History
This is the cornerstone of your CV. Highlight your skills but also proactively applying them to real-world challenges and achieving positive outcomes is what modern employers are searching for. When transitioning between careers, this one particular attribute will prove to be valuable in any company or industry.
If you have extensive work experience, there is no need to burden potential employers with them all. Remember the time factor with hiring managers. List your previous two or three places of work at maximum, highlighting appropriately your skills in use.
You must also include how much time you worked for that company, name, job position, duties and responsibilities. You do not forget to add if you achieved something important in those positions, because you can increase your value for the new one.
Hobbies & Special Interests
If you have the space and choose to include a few hobbies, however, ensure they are suitably relevant to the position. For example, if the job requires you to be a part of a team, you can state you play team sports in your hobbies to emphasise you enjoy being part of a team. Ensure that your hobbies are relevant to the position when applying.
References
You can include references on your CV if the job posting or hiring manager specifically requests it. If no such request is made, you can choose to list your references on a separate sheet in your application or provide it at a later time once you’ve passed preliminary interviewing and have been shortlisted for the job. And include the name, job Title, company and contact number.
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