Say a teacher moving into data analysis has a CV line that reads “Head of Year 10, 2019–2023.” Now imagine a recruiter screening for “experience presenting data to stakeholders.” Chances are the recruiter won’t connect the two. They don’t know that the role included presenting termly results analysis to the school’s governors, and they won’t stop to guess.
A reader can give you credit only for experience they recognize. In this lesson, you’ll do two things with your story bank. First, you’ll translate your stories into the language of your target role. Then, you’ll pull them together into a positioning statement, the thread that connects your past experience to your future direction.
Translate the Work, Not the Title
Translation means describing what you did in your target role’s vocabulary without pretending your past was something else. Read these two versions of the same part of a teacher’s work:
- “Set up a tracking system for Year 10 results.”
- “Cleaned and consolidated results data from four teachers’ spreadsheets into one shared tracker with checked formulas, which the department used every term.”
The first version speaks to a head of science. The second speaks to a hiring manager recruiting data analysts, and it describes exactly the same facts.
The key move is to ask what you actually did, step by step, and to describe those actions in words your target reader uses. Titles like “teacher” or “systems administrator” carry the wrong associations, while actions like collecting data, checking it, and presenting it to nonexperts carry over. Occupation pages on O*NET OnLine list each role’s tasks in plain language, which makes them a handy vocabulary source.
