Tips For Becoming A Corporate Executive After A Collegiate Career

It’s never a very simple undertaking when moving from the world of academics to a corporate environment. 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 are essentially changing industries, which means while there will be some basic skills that you will be able to translate from one career to the other, when it comes down to specific experience, you may be lacking some.

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. You may think that your experience is very slight, but consider what your job has entailed: managing people, making calculations, managing budgets, and even more. 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. You wouldn’t allow your college students to get away with brief, inconsequential and unproved statements, and so you shouldn’t use this vital section of your resume to only discuss your responsibilities in your job as a professor. So instead, this is the time to talk about what you’ve actually accomplished.

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). The idea is to dig down deep, and to find anything that you can that shows your superior qualifications for the 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. However, now’s the time to make a move an explore your abilities; for many professors, turning executive is as simple as learning more about their professional side.