Career Changers
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -Unknown
We all applaud people making career changes. Career changers can find greater job satisfaction and a lifestyle more in tune with their current values. Career changers, however, have the most difficult and frustrating experiences with resumes. When they use the traditional approach of mailing out 100 or more resumes, career changers experience very little success. While having an effective resume is still necessary for career changers, the resume must he used in a way that takes advantage of the hidden job market.
If you are a career changer, the first thing you must do is deter mine the type of position you'll be seeking. Then pick out every experience even remotely related to that line of work and insert it in some form into the resume. The qualifications section is often an excellent place to do this.
When you start describing your employment, you have two main goals:
- show you were successful at what you did; and
- emphasize any parts of your jobs which are related to your current objective.
Using Evaluations and Letters of Commendation
To write a successful resume, the person with 6-30 years in the military needs to have confidence that the abilities he or she possesses are marketable. Without that assurance the resume will probably come out bland and next to useless. Feel good about yourself. Regardless of your function in the military, you developed skills there which are valuable in the civilian job market. Those responsible for getting you to re-enlist have probably painted a pretty bleak picture of the difficulties of finding a civilian job. If you plan well, analyze your strengths, and are clear on what you want to do in civilian life, you should have no more difficulties than anyone else finding the job you want.
As a military person you have undoubtedly saved your fitness reports, evaluations, and letters of commendation. Selected short quotations can be included in your resume to make positive statements about yourself. Praise coming from an objective third party, especially from a superior, will carry more weight than if you made the same statement about yourself. Rarely should anyone include more than one or two quotes in the resume, so choose them wisely.
Generally you should take your addendum (label it "Portions of Annual Evaluations") with you on interviews so that if it seems appropriate you could give a copy to your interviewer. Occasionally you might include it with your resume when you send it in the mail, but our research indicates that people with professional or technical experience are usually better off not including letters of recommendations or evaluations with their resumes.
For some military people a functional resume works best because no matter how they describe their jobs, they don't sound like anything that goes on in the civilian world.
Use Your Strengths
Analyze your background carefully and emphasize the experience that will help sell you into a civilian job. There may be functions you performed in the military that are so unique to the military that they should be mentioned briefly or not at all. You have done plenty of things which civilian managers are looking for so emphasize those things.
If you have been involved in any phase of electronics, data processing, mechanics, or other technical fields, you are highly market able. The U.S. government has invested thousands of dollars training you, and there are employers who desperately want that expertise and experience.
Many ex-pilots have gone to work for airlines and defense contractors. Don't feel limited to seeking jobs that are directly related to your military functions, however. As an officer you were assigned various command positions. Describe them properly, and you can sell yourself into a mid-management or executive position. Whatever your background, sell your experience.
Things to Avoid
As you write your resume, scrupulously avoid military jargon, also known as militarese. Let a civilian read your resume to determine if your descriptions are understandable.
Be careful about mentioning the supervision of large numbers of people. In the military, to have responsibility for 500 people is not unusual, but most presidents of companies never have 500 people under their control. Seeing such large numbers can seem threatening. Generally you would only list the number of direct reports. Avoid phrases like "Responsible for overseeing a $95 million bud get." In the military overseeing large budgets is common, but in the private sector, only presidents of the largest companies could make such statements. Again, it can seem threatening.
The same principle would apply if you were a pilot or ship's captain: "Responsible for a $21 million piece of equipment" (pilot) or, "Had total responsibility for operating and maintaining a $260 million piece of equipment" (captain of a destroyer). The statements may sound impressive, but they are actually counterproductive.
