How I Updated My Resume to Move Towards a Brand New Career

In my previous post, I wrote about the "action steps" outlined in Stephanie DeLorenzo's book Navigating the Chaos: The Ultimate Emergency Management Career Guide. One of them, "Create or update your resume using the principles outlined in this chapter," required a bit more thinking before I could act:

Anyway, there are skills I'm strong in, others I'm still working on shoring up, and some (like data analysis) that are misaligned but still foundational. Journaling will be key: not just what I'm working with, but also what I believe about my work to this point. Then, just as I learned in therapy, I can work on reframing my experiences.

A note about the job market before I continue

By now I've seen dozens of articles, videos, LinkedIn posts, and other hot takes on how blindingly difficult the job market is right now. Although it's comforting to see I'm not the only person who had to move into a whole new line of work just to make ends meet, it's also extremely disconcerting.

Being "of a certain age," I know I'm not most employers' first pick. My health insurance risk – and thus costs – are higher. So is my risk of injury and disability. What I have in life and work experience, I lack in early-adopter enthusiasm. I can also see past a lot of the gaslighting that passes for motivation these days.

Still, I'm not so old that all I want to do is sunset my life on a beach. I still have the cognitive capacity and interest to want to contribute something to my world. And at least for now, that's emergency management.

Redefining my work life and what it means

DeLorenzo lists out transferable skills that are valuable in emergency management:

• Project / program management
• Relationship building / management
• Stakeholder engagement
• Leading people and teams
• Public speaking
• Briefing senior leaders
• Working under stress
• Written communication / report writing
• Multitasking
• Managing competing deadlines
• Improving processes

This was very helpful, because as I mentioned, I have a very unconventional and nonlinear career to date. Having spent the bulk of my career working from home writing articles and raising children, I felt pretty limited. I took most of my skills in stride because I thought they were expected, nothing that made me special.

Earlier versions of my resume, back when I was in corporate marketing, had plenty of measurable results and action verbs like "spearheaded." However, these bullet points all felt like someone else's accomplishments, not mine.

I deleted them all after I decided, following the second layoff, that I didn't want to work in marketing anymore. My success metrics needed to look different.

But then we survived a pandemic. I got divorced. And then my two anchor clients "went in a different direction" just months before the first large language models were made available to the general public, irrevocably changing the landscape for professional writers.

Building a more true-to-me resume

As I reviewed DeLorenzo's list of transferable skills, I realized how many I'd developed over the course of my career, however unconventional it had been:

• I'd managed both marketing campaigns and my own peer-reviewed research project.
• I'd built many, many relationships with clients, customers, advertisers, and stakeholders.
• I'd started out in customer service in my very first job as a tech support specialist, and I'd relied on those phone skills ever since.
• I'd found working under stress had a way of focusing my energy and efforts. Although I often questioned whether that was the best way to manage my life, I could multi-task and manage competing deadlines as needed.
• Although I didn't want to write anymore, I soon found myself working on a project at my new job that relied on that talent.

Orienting on my existing skills called for a functional resume rather than a chronological one. There are elements of a chronology in the resume I came up with, but it mainly focuses on three core skills: research and investigations, project and program management, and team collaboration and relationship building.

This way I was able to see and appreciate just how much I've accomplished over the years, and to frame it all in a way that felt the most authentic to me.

Finishing touches

Using DeLorenzo's resume template, I carefully reconstructed what I'd done with my career and how I was working to support my new one (including the two dozen or so FEMA certificates I'd earned). Then I came up with the following profile statement:

Communications professional with 30 years of experience in writing, client & customer relations, and project & program management making a career transition to civil service and emergency management. Able to shift between collaborative and independent work in both low and high pressure environments, with stakeholders at multiple levels.

I know my new resume is thin on practical experience, and I'm working on ways to remedy this through existing opportunities, using existing skills like relationship building and my writing. For the moment, my goal is to demonstrate my commitment to building my career in this space as far as I can take it.

Have you ever changed careers before, or are you doing so now? How did it go, or how's it going?