How to write a CV for a career change

Nothing on your CV is untrue. It is filed under the wrong headings. A hiring manager in the field you are moving into reads for their own vocabulary, and an honest description of what you did for the last six years is written in somebody else's. That is the whole problem, and it is a smaller problem than it feels.

A career change is a rewriting job, not a reinvention. Every date, employer, job title and qualification stays exactly as it is, because the moment any of those move you have a different and much worse problem. What changes is the order things appear in, and the words underneath them. This guide is about making those two changes deliberately, one advert at a time.

Put yourself on the other side of the desk. Someone is reading 30 CVs for an administrator post, and most of them come from people who have been administrators. Yours says care assistant, or duty manager, or teaching assistant. They are not hostile. They are pattern matching, quickly, and your CV hands them no pattern to match. The gap is not in your experience. It is in the distance between how your last field described the work and how this one does.

The mismatch almost always sits in the noun, not the skill. A duty manager who built a rota for 22 staff across seven-day trading has done scheduling under constraint. Rota is a hospitality word and scheduling is an office word, and the thing underneath them is the same thing. The same goes for handled the till and cash reconciliation, for handover notes and case records, for sorted out complaints and resolved to a service standard.

Two things follow. First, translation is a vocabulary job and never an invention job, because everything you write still has to hold up at reference and at interview. Second, the top third of the page carries almost all the weight. A reader who finds no pattern in the first fifteen lines rarely goes hunting for one in the last ten.

"I have done this job for nine years, I want out, and every advert wants experience I do not have." That is the reader this is written for, and the answer is usually that you have more of the experience than your CV currently admits to.

It works best where the new role sits next door to something you already do. Retail to administration, hospitality to customer service, support work to health administration: different settings, overlapping daily tasks, the same underlying habits.

It does not work where the requirement is a hard one. If the advert asks for a licence, a registration, a named qualification or a right to practise, no amount of rewording produces one. Translation makes existing evidence legible. It does not create evidence, and a CV that implies otherwise falls over at the first question.

1. Pick one advert, not a direction. "Something in admin" produces general-purpose copy that lands nowhere. Print the advert, or paste it somewhere you can mark it up.
2. Underline the essential criteria only. There are usually five to eight. The desirable list is noise until the essentials are answered.
3. Answer each one in your old vocabulary first. Write the fact that answers it in whatever words come naturally, with the volume, the frequency and the setting attached. Do not edit at this stage. Editing while you are still recalling makes you vague.
4. Now change the noun, not the fact. The verb usually survives translation. It is the object it acts on that needs the new field's word. Kept the handover book becomes maintained written records to a fixed format. The activity described is identical.
5. Reorder around the first two criteria. Whatever answers the top of the advert moves to the top of the role. A career-change CV that saves its best evidence for the third bullet of the second job is not being read that far.
6. Cut what answers nothing. This is the step people skip. In a change of direction, whole bullets from your old CV are now irrelevant, and keeping them costs you the space the translated ones need.
7. Say what you are doing once, in the profile. One or two lines naming the move and what you bring to it. Then stop, and let the evidence carry the rest.
8. Read it as the new field would. Out loud, or better, to somebody who already does the job you are applying for. They will stop at the first word that belongs to your old industry.

Do not change your job title. Writing operations coordinator where your contract said care assistant is the one edit that unravels at reference. If your title means nothing outside your old industry, leave it alone and add a plain gloss in brackets.

Do not delete the field you are leaving. A CV with a nine-year hole in it is read far worse than a CV with an obvious change of direction in it.

Do not translate into words you cannot defend. If you write stakeholder management, be ready to name the stakeholders. Consultancy vocabulary attached to nothing is more damaging than the plain version it replaced.

Do not open with your passion for the new field. It reads as compensation for missing evidence, and it takes the space the evidence needed.

Do not paste the advert's phrases into a skills list. A criterion answered by a bullet with a volume and a setting in it reads as evidence. The same words in a comma-separated row read as a wish.

The step people find hardest is the honest comparison, because you already know why your experience is relevant and you cannot unknow it. Career Auntie's CV review reads your CV against the specific advert and quotes your own lines back inside each finding, with a severity attached. On a career-change CV the ones to read first are the missing-keyword findings, because those are usually criteria you do answer, in the old field's words. Where a finding needs a fact only you have, it becomes a direct question, and your answer feeds a tailored CV. The generator will not invent a figure that is not in the CV you give it, which matters more here than anywhere: translation stays safe only while every fact underneath it stays yours.