Job Interviews For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Chapter 14

Selling Scripts for Career Switchers

In This Chapter

Career-changing without experience in a new field

Bridging an experience gap with crossover skills

Scripting persuasive answers to tough questions

People change careers for many variations of two reasons: They leave their career, or their career leaves them. Either way, employment challenges are much the same when it comes to marketing yourself in places where you haven’t been before.

Even when you think you can easily transition from one career field or industry to another (the manager-can-manage-anything syndrome), employers can be a hard sell when it comes to greenlighting career changers for a payroll. Except when they’re filling entry-level jobs, hiring authorities have a frustrating habit of preferring candidates who, on someone else’s payroll, have proven that they can do the work a job requires.

American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s summary of the two views — yours and an employer’s — leaps to mind:

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing; others judge us by what we have done.

When you’re trying ...