Career change guides

Most writing about changing career is about deciding. These three guides are about the paperwork afterwards, when the decision is made and your CV is still written for the job you are leaving. That is where people stall. Nothing on the page is untrue and none of it lands, because a manager in the new field reads for their own vocabulary and yours belongs to somebody else. So each guide takes one move, names the tasks that carry across intact, names the two or three that genuinely do not, and then retypes real lines from the old job into the words the new one uses.

Each guide is one starting point, one destination, and pairs of lines carrying identical facts.

• Retail into administration. A stock count is records accuracy. A rota is scheduling. Cashing up is reconciliation. It is just as clear about the two things retail does not hand you: named business software, and writing formally to people who keep the letter.
• Hospitality into customer service. Pace and de-escalation transfer almost whole. Sitting in one chair for a shift, writing at volume, does not. A Saturday service of 190 covers is written twice, for the restaurant and a contact centre.
• Sales into customer success. The move that fails most often, because a sales CV with relationships added is still a sales CV. One quota year is reordered as a retention year, every figure left where it was.

Nothing is added between a before and an after. If the second version knows something the first did not, that is invention.

The method travels further than the three pairings, so read the nearest one and take the process. Retail into administration is the best starting point for leaving any shop floor, warehouse or front of house job for an office, because it works through records, scheduling, money and suppliers one task at a time.

If your destination is similar work in a different setting, the general version is how to write a CV for a career change, over in career advice. It keeps every date, employer and title fixed and changes only the order and the wording underneath them.

Once your rewrite exists, put it in front of the CV review with a genuine advert from the new field. The findings tagged as a missing keyword are usually the translations you have not made yet.

A translation holds only while it stays true. If you did not investigate the variance, then investigated is not a word available to you, and one follow-up question at interview will establish that.

Career Auntie can help with the wording and not with the facts, which is the right way round. The skills gap analysis returns up to five gaps, each written as a direct question with a suggested first-person draft that you then rewrite in your own words, and it returns nothing at all when you are already a strong match. A generated CV runs to about two pages and cannot introduce a figure that was not in your source. Both of those limits are working for you here.