Quintessential Careers Press: Surefire Resumes for New Graduates and Other Entry-Level Candidates Chapter 4: Portray your Skills as Transferable and Applicable to Your Post-college Career Page 27 Portraying Transferable Skills in Your Resume Most new college grads are not career changers, but to illustrate the portrayal of transferable skills, let's look at the career-changer's dilemma. We were asked to do a resume makeover for a woman who wanted to become an account representative (sales, in other words). I won't tell you what field she sought to change from; see if you can guess it from this entry on her old resume about her current job: Utilize personal computer for word processing, spreadsheets, and graphic design including internal/external correspondence, reports, procedure manuals and presentations. Create and distribute a variety of queries and reports using Access. Process confidential employee records such as salary changes, vacation/absenteeism reports and performance appraisals, etc. Complete and submit invoices to process for payments. Schedule meetings/appointments and make travel arrangements. Accountable for reconciliation of expense reports. Develop and maintain product application guides using flowcharts. Did you guess secretary? You're right. Her resume screams "secretary," not account representative. We told her that if she really wanted an account rep position, she was emphasizing the wrong skills. She should not have been emphasizing clerical and secretarial skills --- or even computer skills. None of those skills is even mentioned in the ads she sent me typifying the kind of job she wanted. We told her she should be emphasizing sales, customer service, interpersonal, and communications skills. Almost nothing in her current job --- the way she portrayed it on her old resume --- supported her desire to be an account rep. Yet, I'm sure her job requires great interpersonal skills, and she interacts with lots of different people and solve the problems of her boss and others. Those are the kinds of skills needed in the account rep jobs. For example, we told her that instead of saying "Schedule meetings/appointments and make travel arrangements," she should say "Interact with a wide variety of personalities to schedule meetings and make travel arrangements." That's what you need to do if you're seeking a new job. Think of everything you've done in terms of how it is transferable to what you want to be doing and portray it that way. For every item on your resume, think: How can I portray this skill so that it supports the idea of doing what I want to do in my next job? If you can't make it support what you want to do, leave it out. Previous Page Next Page Back to Surefire Resumes for New Graduates and Other Entry-Level Candidates Index Page