I came across this great article about weaving a cohesive story from of a resume full of seemingly unrelated jobs. This exactly where people like me shine and blow away the more-qualified competition (and you can learn to do this too). I’ve held a lot of very exciting but very different jobs over the last decade, and one of the ways you get hired in an industry you’ve never worked in before is to show the hiring manager how your current skills translate well to the type of work they need done. Anna Ranieri supports this notion too, in her Harvard Business Review Article, “Turning Your Complex Career Path into a Coherent Story“:
…you can articulate how all of your varied experiences and skills actually make you a better candidate than the conventional applicant. How do you do that? You tell your story in a way that connects the dots. Unlike a more typical candidate, you have to assure that your audience can identify the thread that runs through your career narrative and make sense of your varied skills, training, experiences, and choices.
Forget titles, positions, and industries. Focus on what you’re best at, using terms that pull together your diverse experiences, those seemingly unrelated industries and the serendipitous opportunities you’ve had to learn something new.
She goes into more detail to help you find your common thread over at HBR.org:
Source: Turning Your Complex Career Path into a Coherent Story
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