It s never a simple process to move from the academic world to a corporate system. These worlds can be vastly different, requiring different things from their high level counterparts.
However, being a go getter, it’s shouldn’t be difficult for you to make the shift from professor to executive if you so desire. It’s just a matter of feeling confident that you can get the job done on either side of the fence.
But if you’re still not sure about how to do it, here are some tips to help you make the transition.
Try a Functional Resume
While some recruiters and employers dislike the functional resume because they feel it doesn’t tell the whole story, this is still a good route to take when making a shift from the academic to corporate world. You re basically changing your field of work, and you may lack some experiences that other job candidates have even if you ve got the same basic skills.
With a functional resume, you will be able to place the majority of the resume’s focus on how you are specifically aligned with the executive position you are going after. Regardless of how much experience you d had in your professor job, you ve probably got a history of calculating figures, budget management, team building, management, and projecting outcomes, and these are vital experiences. The more you take corporate terms and align them with your academic experience, the better your chances will be of proving that you are the right person for the position you want.
Make Your Accomplishment Statements Strong
In your resume, there will be opportunities to spell out your accomplishments. It is absolutely essential to make the accomplishments statement into an incredibly strong part of the resume. This space could be used to talk about responsibilities, and to briefly detail what your job as a professor entailed, but you wouldn t ever allow such basic information from your students. Instead, this space needs to be used to show real, active accomplishments that you ve undertaken.
How do you get this done? As addressed earlier, your focus here is lining up your experiences as a professor with the probable responsibilities of the executive level job that you re trying to get. If you’ve been a board committee lead, this is a good time to not just say you led a committee, but say exactly what you accomplished on the committee (talk about the committee’s hardships, how you helped pull it through, how many people you led, what goals you had and how you fulfilled them). You want to show anything in your long history that indicates that your experience as a professor is adequate to qualify you for an executive position. Remember that you need to put your best foot forward and show the best qualifications that you can as a professor and future executive.
Probably one of the most difficult aspects of making the switch from one industry to another is being so settled in your current field that you have no clear perspective of how you can make a difference in a new industry. This is really the time to look at the professional side of yourself, though with the right approach, professors can become very successful corporate executives.
Author Resource:
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