How to write a CV for a career change

Your job titles, dates, employers and qualifications stay exactly as they were — a career change is not a reason to blur facts. What changes is the framing: which achievements you lead with, and how you describe the skills behind them, so a reader in a new field can see their relevance immediately.

Rewriting a CV without a target role produces vague, general-purpose copy that doesn't land anywhere. Decide on the specific role (or a small cluster of very similar roles) you're aiming for before you touch a single bullet point — everything else in this guide depends on that choice.

Look at what you actually did — not just your job title — and connect it to skills the new role needs: communication, problem-solving, stakeholder management, organisation. The bridge is always the same: the task, the skill it demonstrates, then evidence that you did it well.

Before: 'Responsible for handling customer queries.' After: 'Resolved an average of 30+ customer queries a day, identifying recurring issues and feeding them back to the product team — strengthening cross-team communication and problem-solving.' Only ever adapt this pattern to evidence you can actually stand behind.

Read the target job description line by line and pull out the essential criteria. For each one, ask whether you have real evidence — a project, a result, a piece of feedback — and use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to write it up clearly.

Before you send it: does every bullet point support the target role? Have you removed unexplained jargon from your old industry? Have you avoided simply swapping the job title while leaving the content untouched? A career-change CV should read like it was written for this role, not adapted from the last one.

Once you've mapped your experience, tailor your own CV directly against the role you want — and if you're exploring more than one direction, repeat the process for each target role rather than sending the same CV everywhere.