by Philip Lop

Created on: October 14, 2010

Unless you work in a highly specialist role (and sometimes even if you do) it’s vital that your resume reflects the core skills and experience that you can bring to an advertised role. What your resume should demonstrate is how you are able to apply your capabilities from one role to another. Recruiters are not just looking for evidence of skills and experience. They want to see how candidates are able to transfer them from one role to another. This is a vital and consistently overlooked aspect of the resume that can be the difference between getting an interview and getting rejected at the first hurdle.

Whilst your resume should explain what you achieved, describing *how* you achieved it can be the most effective way to demonstrate transferable skills.  The use of specific language here is critical. In very few words you can demonstrate how you have transferred your skills from one role to another. Try and talk about how you have ‘adapted’ previous experience and/or ‘applied learning’ to a situation. Talk about the thought process that enables you to do this with keywords like ‘evaluating’ or ‘considering’ specific business situations. Realistically, if there are many candidates, recruiters will probably scan resumes for key words and phrases so try and ensure that yours is full of this kind of language.

Very specific examples of how you have applied learning in a previous role will also be very useful. A project manager moving into an operational role, for example, might want to consider how his skills in time management and process control were adapted in a more operational environment. Think about the ways that experience in one industry might lend itself to another. A role working in manufacturing, for example, could yield extremely useful experience in understanding quality assurance and how this can be applied to volume transaction businesses. Strong resumes capture key skills and demonstrate how the individual has been able to apply those across a number of roles in different business environments.

Ensuring that your resume focuses on key skill areas can be particularly useful for inexperienced employees or for students looking to break into paid employment for the first time. Your ability to meet the role requirements will almost certainly need to be proven through experience and skills outside the workplace. You might want to consider, for example, where you have held positions of responsibility

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>