What are the ways to write a professional Summary When Changing Career?
To create a winning Do-it-yourself (DIY) career change resume, we should be fully aware of every standard and modern resume writing standards as well as ATS readability requirements, including specific demands of the targeted company and job role. Go through the brief description of how to write a professional summary, renowned as starting paragraph of resume when changing your career journey. HR and the reader start reviewing your resume from the top, which means a Professional Summary will be a crucial factor for success. The top and opening paragraphs are called Professional Summary, Qualifications Summary, Executive Summary or Profile, and Simple Summary.
We as a team are 100% sure that this content is going to undoubtedly clear your every question and confusion about how to write a professional summary when changing careers.
- Standards for writing summaries for Career Change Resumes: A summary in a Career Change Resume will differ from a Traditional Resume. Because Career Change Resume opening statement and summary will be all about THE TRANSFERABLE SKILLS per the needs of targeted job role different from your background.
- Difference b/w summaries of Career Change Resumes and Traditional Resumes,
- Traditional/Standard Resumes contain a Professional Title at the top of the Summary Paragraph. Examples of professional titles are Project Manager, Software Engineer, IT Manager, or Admin Manager. Then we put the header such as Summary, Professional Profile, Professional Summary, or Executive Summary, highlighting your core skills, experiences, and expertise.
- However, Career Change documents/resumes have different standards to pass Applicant Tracking System (ATS). In the Career Change Resume Summary, we will put the header as Qualifications Summary, which is different from Traditional Resume, as I stated earlier. Further, there will be no targeted position name on the top. But we will add the Objective Statement at the end of the Qualifications Summary to indicate HR about your targeted position.
- We write a branding statement as the first line in the Simple Resume which highlights core skills and experiences in compliance with the ATS requirements of the targeted company and job links.
- But in Career Change Resumes, we will enlist Transferable Skills of previous experiences related to the targeted position in a branding statement.
- Professional Summaries should show a combination of hard and soft skills per targeted jobs but qualifications Summaries shall focus more on Transferable Skills.
Ways or Steps to writing a Qualifications Summary when switching careers
1) Branding Statement, First Line of Qualifications, or career change summary statement examples
- It can contain related education, courses, and certifications, if any.
- Dedicated and motivated professional with ITIL Foundation Certification, Project Management Professional Certification, or Bachelor of Science in IT Management. (Focus should be on items related to the targeted position)
- If you don’t have related education, courses, and certifications, then we must extract transferable skills from professional experience and enlist them in the branding statement.
- Performance-driven and detail-oriented professional with a solid background in contributing to the deployment and maintenance of IT systems whilst working as a customer service representative within the IT support team.
- Suppose you don’t have related education, courses, certifications, or transferable skills. In that case, we will write a branding statement by extracting soft skills from the provided job posting links or searching through Google if job posting links aren’t provided.
- Technically minded professional with in-depth knowledge of deploying, maintaining, testing, and upgrading technical systems and software.
2) Hard Skills
The next part of the Qualifications Summary in the Career Change Resumes is to enlist hard skills. We should mention hard skills as per the requirements of the targeted position.
- Suppose you are a Store Manager looking to target the training and development manager position. Extracting transferable skills in this case will be easy. Store Manager deals with employee hiring, training, and other activities. We can then enlist hard skills as,
- Versatile manager, director, or leader with repeated success in building and leading cross-functional teams; plan and conduct strategic training and development programmes for continuous process and performance optimisation.
- Suppose you are an HR Manager looking to target the Sales Director position. Extracting transferable skills can be difficult in this case. Now, we will look same skills in both titles,
- Team Management
- Networks & Relationship Building
- Market Research & Analysis
- Time Management
- Performance Evaluation & Optimization
- Process Improvement
We can now write a winning line by combining the above three common skills, “Expert in leading teams, conducting marketing research, building and expanding corporate networks, and maintaining robust relationships at all levels.
3) Soft Skills
Whenever we are writing a resume or professional summary for a career change resume, we can’t ignore the importance or the power of soft skills. It is highly recommended to add soft skills as these play a pivotal role in the success of any professional career, especially valuable when you’re transitioning to a new field.
You can consider these ways to integrate soft skills into your professional summary when changing careers:
- The soft skills, not the generic ones.
- Previous experience is vital.
- Some examples of soft skills that you can highlight in your professional summary:
- Communication: However, this ability is often treated as a hard skill in certain professions.
- Teamwork
- Problem-solving
- Adaptability and flexibility
- Time management
- Creativity and innovation
4) Objective Statement
The addition of an objective statement as part of the career change summary will be another added advantage. This statement should show explicitly how the qualifications and the background are having transferrable skills related to the particular position/job that one was seeking for.
Example: Highly equipped and ready for a competitive position of HR Manager.
Key Points to Remember:
- Highlighting Transferable skills
- Mentioning Related Credentials
- Preparing separate summaries depending on the job post.
- Adding Objective Statement.
Some Professional Examples of Career Change Summary
Conclusion
Use the above professional tips from Proresumes.io to write a winning qualifications summary for a career change resume highlighting transferable skills and increasing the probability of getting your desired job in a different career sector. A good Qualifications or Career Change Resume Summary is an essential starting point for any person aspiring to achieve his career change objectives. Allow ProResumes.io to accompany you on that fascinating adventure.
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