Using Your Past Experience to Build Whatever Career You Want

Trying to take your career in a different direction? The secret is in your past. By applying your past experience effectively and planning carefully, you can take the things you've done before and make them a great foundation for anything. Here's how.

Think of Where You Want to Go With Your Career
You should get a clear picture in your mind where you're trying to end up in your career. This will dictate how you shape your experience in the future, and how you present your previous jobs on your resume.

Research to Find the Realities of the Job Market
Finding a specialty that no one is looking to hire for isn't going to do you much good, unless you're pursuing your lifelong dream and you don't care how long it takes. Know the realities of the job market so you can consider how it will work for you, instead of against you.

Look for the Strongest Patterns
No matter how many jobs you've had, in however many fields, there will certainly be patterns that emerge on your resume. Those patterns can be linked by job responsibility, industry, profession, or anything else. For instance, maybe you've had numerous jobs in sales and marketing hidden among other positions. Or maybe over the years you've had several positions dealing with cosmetics, ranging from salon operation to makeup-products distribution. Look for the patterns and seek to emphasize them. Sometimes that means clearing out or abbreviating other things on your resume that distract from them.

Match the Patterns of Your Experience to Your Long-Term goals
Now is where the real power of this process happens. Now that you know the realities of the job market and have a clear idea of where you'd like to end up, you can start to brainstorm ways to match the patterns of your career experience to push your job search toward your long-term goals. Basically, you're looking to match the past with the present, with as little of a bump as possible in-between the two. For example, let's say you've got some management experience in industrial operations, and you're seeking to get into sales and marketing of big-ticket items. Then perhaps your best bet would be to orient your search toward sales of industrial products. To do so, emphasize your industrial operations experience and how that would make you a more effective sales person.

Enrich, Enhance, and Emphasize Desirable Patterns
Once you've established the direction and strategy of your career plans, then it's time to take that experience and add extra power to that. Join highly relevant professional organizations. Or publish articles and do speaking engagements on your specialty. Or why not build a Website discussing detailed aspects of the profession? There are almost unlimited ways you can boost up the power of your experience and more sharply point it toward where you're trying to go.