All Career Levels and Situations

One thing that can help you stand out at any career level or in any career situation is a strong cover letter. Even though the cover letter won’t always be read, that isn’t always the point.

Early Career

Early career professionals span anywhere from students to grads to those with up to about 5 years of career experience.

At this level, it’s easy for many to fall into the trap of believing they have very little to offer, or that they have nothing unique to offer that sets them apart from the masses.

There are a lot of nuanced ways to demonstrate your knowledge, experience, and ultimate value, even as an early career professional.

College Course Names

At this level (especially for students and grads), including the names of relevant college courses or projects on your resume is an excellent way to (1) demonstrate the details of your degree plan, and (2) get some additional relevant keywords into your resume – at a time when your official work experience may not yet include them.

You can also reference relevant courses or projects in your cover letter or during the interview process to help further demonstrate the real-world application of your skills.

Internships

At this level, internships can often be given the same level of detail as you would an employment position (though please note that you should never intentionally misrepresent internships as employment).

Internships can be a great way to show how you operate in a work environment, how you handle entry-level functions of the role, and what you’re able to achieve when given real-world opportunities.

Unrelated Jobs

Many professionals at this level consider leaving off unrelated jobs they worked while going through college, or they include the jobs with very simple and totally non-relevant job descriptions.

It can be much more beneficial to list those jobs and translate the descriptions so they’re easier to understand by your target audience. This often requires some outside-the-box thinking, but when done correctly can really help add value to your experience.

Volunteer Experience

Much like internships, volunteer roles can often be given the same level of detail as an employment position and they can be a great way to show how you operate in a real-world work environment.

When crafting descriptions for these, use the same creativity you did in your unrelated jobs to make sure you’re communicating the responsibilities of the role.

Mid Career

Mid-career can encompass anyone with 5-15 years’ experience, give or take a year or two in either direction on either side, depending on the unique experience of each individual.

At this level, it’s important to be able to show accomplishments of some sort. Being able to communicate and/or demonstrate your achievements and accomplishments is one of the best ways to show your potential and to elevate yourself above other candidates with similar experience.

TIP: If you don’t make it a practice to track your achievements as they happen, I recommend getting started on that right away. It will make this process a lot easier and it will help you immensely in your job search and throughout your career.

Another important way you can set yourself apart at this level is to be able to demonstrate your reputation.

What have you become known for so far in your career, and how does that bring value to your colleagues, superiors, and/or the company as a whole? This insight can help hiring decision-makers to better understand who you are as an employee and how well you would fit in the role they’re hiring for.

Finally, at this level it’s important to be able to communicate your plans and goals for the future of your career, and your strategies for achieving them.

Being able to communicate this is a great way to show that you’re being intentional in your career and you’re moving in a clear target direction. This helps to add a perceived sense of stability in you as a candidate and let’s the decision-maker know that you aren’t just there on a whim.

Senior Individual Contributor

Senior-level individual contributors have a lot of value to share from their expertise and career longevity.

At this level, it’s beneficial to focus on what you’ve built so far in your career.

Like in mid-career, individual accomplishments are important; but what can be even more powerful is to be able to show how your accomplishments have built up to something over time.

What major contributions to company success can you demonstrate?

And even though individual contributors often don’t have direct leadership they can point to, there are other types of leadership that show a lot of strength and value.

One important type of indirect leadership is the ability to rally support or influence others, even though you aren’t actually their supervisor.

If your colleagues listen to you and trust your judgement, or if they come to you for advice, that’s a unique skill that not everyone has. And it’s a high-value selling point – so if this is something you know you’re good at, use it!

Another type of indirect leadership is innovation, or leadership of ideas.

If you’re the type who’s consistently driving ideas forward, improving processes, and coming up with new, better ways of getting things done – that’s a really valuable type of leadership, too. Especially if it involves presenting these ideas to company leadership and making a case for their relevance / importance. Not everyone can do that.

Senior Manager & Up (Director, VP, Executive)

This level is when you’ll really start to show complexity of leadership.

Beyond the leadership skills mentioned above, you also want to show your abilities in higher-level strategic planning.

This may include your ability to beyond leadership and talent development to really create strategy in succession planning. Or how you’ve successfully collaborated with other leaders to achieve business objectives.

Consider how you’ve brought innovation or been a leader of change in your organization.

It’s also important to be able to show a broader understanding of how your work – and the people / operations you lead – effect the success of the company.

Through this, you can show your ability to identify and mitigate business risks and ultimately help provide the right forward trajectory for the company.

Communicating these more complex aspects of leadership will help set you apart at higher levels.

Career Change / Return to Work

The first thing I want to emphasize is that you have unique value, and you get to tell the story of your career.

It can be easy for us to feel insecure when our career background is a little disjointed or non-linear, and we start to feel like that’s all anyone is going to see when they consider us.

And that’s probably true – if that’s the way you present yourself on paper or in your online profiles.

But, if you take a step back, look at the big picture, and think outside the box to figure out how to tell your story in a way that connects the dots in a way that you know the connections are there.

You wouldn’t be interested in this new career area if there weren’t reasons from your background that make you feel that way.

For most people – you know, deep down, that you’re qualified for those jobs, otherwise you wouldn’t be so excited about it and drawn to it.

So if you can connect the dots of your ‘non-liner’ background for them, they’re going to see whatever story you put in front of them.

You’re the storyteller – you get to choose how the story goes.

The trick is to be able to identify that for yourself and learn how to communicate that in a way that your new target audience understands.

Go deep with your research into your new target positions so you can translate your language from that of the old industry into that of the new.

The next major concept I want to share with you is about transferable skills.

There are a lot of misconceptions about transferable skills, and the biggest thing I want you to be aware of is that ‘transferable skills’ aren’t just one set of particular skills that are considered ‘transferable’.

Transferable skills can be just about any skill that you have, so long as you can prove it’s applicability to your new target career direction.

You have to be able to identify the skills that are transferable, and communicate and demonstrate how they are of value to your new pursuits.

Again, this all comes down to the idea that you’re the storyteller. You get to construct the narrative.

It can take some outside-the-box thinking to identify your unique set of transferable skills, so I want to help illuminate some important skills that are often common in successful career changes. (And these actually apply to both career change and return-to-work.)

Quick learning skills

For someone who is returning to work or embarking on a career change, being able to pick up new skills, processes, and concepts quickly is important. Demonstrating that you can do this will help set hiring manager’s minds more at ease and could potentially help elevate you above other candidates.

Often, just saying you’re a quick learner is not enough to carry the impact you want.

Instead, if you can demonstrate in your resume (and/or throughout the interview process) the various times when you picked up a new technology or learned a new system quickly, that goes a lot further in proving that you actually are a quick learner.

Versatility & Adaptability

For someone returning to work or making a career change, it’s also important to be able to show your versatility and/or adaptability. This will help reassure hiring decision-makers that you will be able to catch-up with changes that have happened since you left the workforce, or any new concepts that come up in your career change.

‘Unofficial’ Work

Volunteering for an organization or taking up roles for your child’s school both take time, and often a great deal of skill, too.

These pieces of your background can (and should) be incorporated into your story if they help demonstrate what you were doing during a time of unemployment, or if they can prove your experience in a new career area you’re pursuing.

Targeting Remote Work

Often when transitioning into remote work, it can be difficult to identify the skills we have that transfer into that type of work, because we’ve never ‘officially’ done it before.

But the truth is, there are lots of ways to demonstrate your ability to work remotely, even if you’ve never done it before.

First, you can focus on demonstrating your remote work skills. And while remote work skills – much like transferable skills – aren’t necessarily a set group of particular skills, there are some common skills that will help potential employers feel more trusting you as a remote worker.  

You can start by doing research on remote work skills to identify a short list of skills that resonate with you and you feel like you can demonstrate in your work history.

Make sure you use those skills throughout your resume, in your branding materials (like your portfolio or LinkedIn profile), and in your interviews.

Another thing to think about is situations from your work that weren’t necessarily you ‘working remotely’, but that had you functioning in a remote (or remote similar) way.

One example of this is roles in which you’ve had a lot of autonomy, because working remotely requires you to be able to work effectively in an autonomous environment.

Another example of the is cross-locational collaboration or leadership. If you’ve worked in a role that required you to collaborate, manage, or lead across locations, perhaps regionally, nationally, or even globally – that’s a big example of your ability to work effectively in a remote capacity.

In your resume, you might be able to craft a sentence that talks about utilizing ‘remote work skills, technology, and operations while working cross-locationally to…’

You can also demonstrate remote work abilities in situations where you collaborated or managed off-site personal. Even if you were the one going into the office and working from there, if you managed or collaborated with personnel offsite, that’s still working in a remote capacity.

When it comes to remote work, really get creative to get those remote work skills into your descriptions and to emphasize the job functions that may not have been ‘officially’ remote work, but were similar.

Remember – you control the narrative.

You get to tell the story. So craft your story in a way that empowers you and showcases your most relevant strengths in a compelling way that speaks directly to your target audience.