Pandemic forced career switch? Here’s how to update your resume

Manasi Khandelwal, a 28-year-old sales consultant at a travel agency in Kolkata that specialised in mangrove tours, treks to the Sundarbans region in West Bengal. Once the Coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, all tours were cancelled in the wake of the lockdown. Khandelwal applied for a sales job at a mutual fund company with the same resume she had created three years ago but didn't make the cut.

The HR head of this firm gave her friendly advice, update your CV whenever you switch an industry.

The Coronavirus outbreak led to a cumulative loss of 0.7 million jobs across India. Amidst this, there are individuals who are switching to a different sector in the quest to find an employment opportunity.

But the biggest mistake that job-seekers tend to make is using the same resume created for their previous employment applications.

Once you have decided on the field that you will switch to, list out the skills that you already have pertaining to the new field.

For instance, if you are moving to the MF Industry like Khandelwal is planning, skills related to financial products sales would be crucial. For someone who is selling a travel package that is a leisure product, moving to an MF company would require them to sell an investment product.

But, the sales skill remains the same. So the candidate could highlight this aspect in the resume. Sales still remain the most sought-after skill across sectors.

An allied sector is product management where individuals are easily able to move across sectors. Depending on the sector, the product could involve a financial product, website, or an FMCG/technology product/device. In such cases, there could be different skills needed in each company.

So, don't create one resume to be sent en masse to all employers in the sector. Depending on the products/services offered by the company, the resume must be tweaked.

For instance, a content website would need skills related to making the website seamless to access and navigate while an electronics company would need the product to work seamlessly and grab customer attention. The underlying skill is the same, one just needs to tweak the way it is applied.

The same holds for an individual with say actuarial experience in an insurance company. He/she will be in demand across sectors like banking, SME  online lending as well as technology and cybersecurity firms that deal with unpredictable risks of the future.

An actuary's job role involves predicting risks of the future and pricing them accurately. These could involve loans, cyber risk covers including antivirus protection, or the retail industry's anti-theft devices/tags.

So such an individual could tweak the resume to show those skills that would be relevant for the sector. Allied certifications for the specific sector will also be beneficial.

Each industry has a set of associations, institutes that offer these certificates. One could do a three to six month-course to make their CV stand out.

When an employer is looking to hire, the candidate most valued who brings the maximum relevant skills for that job role. Those with generic qualifications on the resume are overlooked.