The career change CV: making your experience count in a new field

When you change field, a recruiter has to work out why your background fits. A career change CV does that work for them, in the first third of the page.

Start with a summary

This is the one case where a summary earns its place. Three lines:

1. Who you are professionally, in the new field's terms.
2. The relevant skills and one result.
3. What you are moving into.

"Operations professional with six years managing teams and budgets in healthcare. Cut clinic waiting times by 30% through a new scheduling process. Now moving into operations analytics, with a certificate in data analysis and working knowledge of SQL."

Translate, do not just list

Go through the target job advert and mark its requirements. For each, find where you have done something comparable and describe it in their words.

• "Taught classes of 30" becomes "presented complex material to groups of 30 and tracked outcomes".
• "Managed the ward rota" becomes "planned staffing for a team of 25 against a fixed budget".

Keep it true. You are changing the vocabulary, not the facts.

Put the bridge near the top

Courses, certificates, side projects, volunteering or freelance work in the new field go directly under the summary, above older experience.

Cut hard

Roles and details that do not support the move can shrink to one line each. Two pages is the maximum; one is better.

Skills section

List the tools and methods of the new field that you can really use, in the advert's wording. This is what screening tools match on first.

Gaps and short roles

State them plainly with dates and one line: "Career break, travel and retraining". Unexplained gaps raise more questions than explained ones.

The cover letter matters more here

Use it to explain the move in two sentences and to show you understand the new role. See how to write a cover letter.