How-to for federal workers navigating a private sector job search

Leaving the government (whether by choice or necessity) can be intimidating, the private sector job search process is opaque and involved, and the mentality and lingo can feel unfamiliar.

But really this career pivot is like any other: you need to translate your skill set for an audience less familiar with it.

My first job out of law school was as niche as it gets. I worked in a non-partisan role for Congress called the Office of the Parliamentarian where we advised on the rules of the House (no, not Robert’s rules of order!). Even within Congress, many staffers had no idea we existed.

In the end, these kinds of transitions can be extremely successful as recruiters and interviewers are excited and intrigued by different backgrounds, and you really stand out among many copycat resumes. However, it does require more upfront work to refine your story and get your foot in the door.

The formula for this kind of pivot is to learn the vocabulary/terminology/lingo of your desired field and then figure out how to translate your story into something that will resonate as useful and relevant. But first, there are a few general points to cover about how the private sector views resumes.

Private sector resume basics

The biggest cultural gap that I expect here (and frankly in most resumes) is that the private sector is obsessed with understanding impact, ideally in a quantified (numerical) form. These numbers also help a recruiter translate your seniority, experience, and level of responsibility to a different job title/leveling system.

Most of the bullets on your resume should have a number in them, for example:

• Size of deal, contract, or grant (overseeing a multi-million dollar contract is more work/shows more responsibility and impact).

• Efficiency increases (by how much you made things faster, simpler, easier).

• Number of people you trained/managed/hired. Shows your experience and seniority level and how you leveraged your impact beyond your own work.  

• How many things you processed each week (cases, applications, patents). This helps people get a sense of the size and scale of the work you did.

Make sure you aren’t copying the job description to your resume. This is probably the most common resume mistake. Recruiters aren’t interested in generic bullets of what your role entails, but specifically what impact you had in your role.

Also don’t do such a good job simplifying and summarizing that the bullets make your job sound easier than it was.

Learn the lingo

You know what you did in your previous/current job, but you don’t yet know how to tell that story in a way that will resonate with people in the field you want to pivot to. 

Start with online research, blogs, articles, Reddit, LinkedIn posts so you know the basics. Don’t ask people things you can search for online yourself.

But then the real secret is informational interviews. Talk to a bunch of people working in the role/field you want to pivot to. Ask their elevator pitch for their current job. Ask what a day in the life looks like. The best and worst parts of the role. What they’d change if they had a magic wand. What keeps them up at night. Which parts of their job give them energy and which drain it. How much time they spend in meetings, what kind of deliverables they are normally responsible for. Ask about the most important qualities or experience to do the job well. Ask what the career growth/promotion possibilities are like.

Most careers have a very specific vocabulary for how they talk. And many large companies have their own special buzzwords too.

I don’t just mean buzzword bingo like circle back, and socialize, and whatever other cringe meme-able business words you might hear. But lingo specific to the profession. Engineers say things like grok, pattern-match, and code smell. Product managers are going to talk about MVPs, iteration, agile, waterfall, and scrum. Program managers (technical or otherwise) might talk about Gannt charts, burndown rate, or Fibonacci estimates. Managers might talk about ZBB, OKRs, fast follow, nerd snipe, and tech debt.

Ideally, you have enough convos that you’ve built up a list of these words and looked up what they mean so they don’t feel like a foreign language. You want to hear how people in the field describe their work so you can use similar language to explain why your previous experience is relevant and applicable.

Tell the story

You need a couple sentence elevator pitch on what you did before and what you want to do now.

Any two jobs have something in common and there’s a way to shape the story to make it feel logical and nearly inevitable that you’re looking to pivot from one to the other.

A simple formula is to say one thing you loved about your current/previous job that’s relevant to where you want to pivot, and one thing you didn’t love that’s the opposite/different in the field you want to go to.

Iterate

Start with informational interviews and work your way up to recruiters and hiring managers. Take note of what resonates and what doesn’t (either how someone reacts during the convo or whether you advance in the interview process). Keep iterating and tweaking your story. Try using different words. Unrolling the story in a slightly different order. Focus on a different project as your example of how your skills are relevant.

Keep tweaking both your elevator pitch of why you’re interested in the role and your answers to more project-based questions of tell me a time when to make your past experience directly applicable to the role you want.

When I was looking to pivot out of Congress, I developed the hypothesis that my role as a Senate Committee staffer was similar to working for a startup. I worked on a small team of about 20 people, my boss’ boss was a Senator, our priorities changed rapidly, and the problems we were trying to solve were ambiguous and amorphous. 

I did a bunch of informational interviews with people in my network more directly familiar with startups and I got better at telling this story in a way that resonated using words like churn, market fit, users (instead of stakeholders), deliverables, and prototypes. 

By the time I got my first job at a startup, my pitch was refined enough that I could keep it to a couple sentences or expand it out to a couple minutes as the circumstances called for. And most importantly people took it at face value that a Senate committee was similar to a startup instead of staring at me skeptically or with disinterest.

More posts coming soon including deep dives on all the questions you’ve wanted to ask a recruiter about resumes and common resume mistakes. Subscribe so you don’t miss out!