Tips For Switching From A Collegiate Career To A Corporate Executive Career

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It’s not always easy to make the shift from the academic world to the corporate world. 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. Because you’re basically changing your industry, you might lack the experiences of competitors in your new field even if some of your basic skills are the same.

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. You absolutely need a strong accomplishments statement to stand any chance when competing for executive level positions. Of course, you could quickly and easily talk about minor responsibilities and the overall function of your job as a college professor, but this won’t be nearly effective enough to land you an executive level position. Instead, this space needs to be used to show real, active accomplishments that you’ve undertaken.

How do you get this done? Again, you want to provide a sense of continuity between your academic and prospective corporate career, so look for experiences that line up between the two. 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. No executive or professor ever rose to the top of his field without giving everything that he had, and the accomplishments section is the perfect place to shine.

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. However, now is the perfect time to learn more about how your abilities and personalities can help you go from professor to corporate executive.

Tips For Switching From A Collegiate Career To A Corporate Executive Career

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