Amy Lindgren

Second Sunday Series — Editor’s Note: This is the sixth of 12 columns on making a career change which appear the second Sunday of the month, from September through August. Last month’s column discussed the back-to-school decision for career changers, while the months before offered career change steps in your 60s; 10 ideas for choosing a new career; a sample timeline; and questions to consider when changing careers. 

Creating résumés for a new line of work can be challenging for career changers. Sure, you could put a new headline on your usual résumé, but how’s that going to look? After just one line of reading, employers in the new field will be wading through information from a totally different field.

That’s like a boat manufacturer adding snowmobiles to their product line and then highlighting pontoons in the snowmobile brochures. Not only would the brochure not align with its headline, but the boat content would not attract snowmobilers. If you’re selling two different things to two different audiences, you need two different brochures.

Now let’s apply the career change example. Suppose you’ve been a public-school math teacher in s for 15 years. You’ve been leading classes in grades 8 through 12, with a few seasons as the math club coach, and another as the department lead.

Could you change careers to be a statistician or business analyst? Almost certainly. But here’s the real question: Would anyone hire you, based on a résumé featuring classroom management and adherence to state teaching standards? Well, probably not. Just as the snowmobiler doesn’t care how many people can fit on a pontoon, corporations hiring statisticians don’t need detail about keeping teenagers engaged in their geometry lessons.

Now let’s add process to purpose. Your purpose remains the same: to create a résumé that employers in your new field will find compelling. Here’s your process.

1. Research ads in the new field: A scan of recent postings reveals that statisticians and business analysts might be asked to: collect, analyze and interpret data; identify trends in data; create questionnaires to collect data; visualize data in charts and tables; advise decision-makers; present data to groups. Baseline tools seem to be Excel and a variety of databases.

2. Interrogate your own skills: Which of the duties noted in the ads can you perform?

3. Find the matches: Think now in terms of a Venn diagram, with two large circles that overlap. In one circle are all the things your target employers want; in the other is the broad range of your skills. Where these circles overlap is where you’ll find the content to highlight in your résumé. In brief: What they need that you can do is what you tell them about.

4. Write your résumé with a new format: Starting your résumé with your teaching experience is like handing the boat brochure to the snowmobile buyer. Here’s a better format for our hypothetical career-changer.

• Headline — For example, “Statistician / Data Analyst skilled in group presentations”

• Profile — Perhaps, Trained mathematician with strengths in statistical data analysis and extensive experience presenting complex information to groups at various levels. Additional skills in developing charts and graphs, and in working on teams to create project plans.

• Key Skills — This could be a short bullet list or a longer section highlighting areas where your abilities align with employers’ needs.

• Notable Projects — As a math teacher, have you created statistics lesson plans? As a volunteer elsewhere, have you developed a questionnaire? In a past job, did you analyze sales numbers to determine how much product to stock? If so, write brief paragraphs for two or three relevant projects. If no? Now is the time to get this experience.

• Professional Experience — At last we come to your current job description. Here’s an example to consider: Jackson County School District, 2010-present. Develop and lead math lessons for classes of 10-30 students, in both virtual and live formats. Work with teaching teams to evaluate annual data, identifying the most effective processes. Advise school leaders on …

You get the idea. Omit the job title and mention of teenagers, classrooms and other terms that will lead the reader astray; focus instead on the tasks most aligned with what new employers need done.

Depending on your career change progress, you may be able to create your new résumé now, or you may discover that you don’t yet have much to say to new employers. If so, that’s a valuable discovery, and one that can lead to other steps in your career change journey.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.