Sitting down to write or review your resume is daunting. Believe me, we know. Especially when you’re hoping to make a change in your career and go after a role that’s different than all others you’ve had, it can be an intimidating thing to wrap your head around. Here is one page of blank space…and you’re supposed to fit your career history there, along with the skills you’ve acquired? That’s hard enough. What if what you used to do, isn’t directly related to what you want to do?

We meet candidates looking to change the direction of their careers and it is possible to do. By reassessing the direction you’d like to go in, acknowledging your transferrable skills, and arranging how to best present them to prospective employers and clients, you have the ability to make a change.

Here’s how to approach the goal without losing your head.

1. Breathe

Do you think every high-level director (or even CEO) had in mind the direct path they thought they’d go to get in their position? No, of course not. They got there through a maze of side steps and their GPS redirecting them at different corners. It’s okay to decide to make a change, the key is to be strategic about it (which is where Creative Circle can help). Remember that you probably know more about what you’re doing than you think.

2. Use Your Resources

Thanks to the world wide web, there are so many resources available to people in the job market. It goes far beyond sites that are clearly only for job seekers. If you’re interested in a new role in an area that is something different than what you’re doing now, do your research! Hop on to Google and see where searches take you. Search job descriptions, reviews of roles at specific companies, and even people’s personal descriptions on their LinkedIn profiles. Search until you’ve practically overdosed on informational content. Get to know what it is you’ll be expected to do, what you’ll need to learn, what types of people you’ll be expected to interface with (and what their skills are), and what the current challenges and goings-on of this industry are. Just as it’s important before an interview to get excited about the company you’re meeting with and know as much about them as possible, think of your new industry that way as well (whether or not you have an interview there or not).

3. Read and Apply Your Words

Look at job descriptions of the roles you want to be in and remember that not only does each company write their job descriptions in a specific way, but specific industries have nuanced terms they use when discussing a specialty or role. As Jocelyn, a senior recruiter at Creative Circle NY says, “There can be seven different ways to say the same thing.” Pay attention to the language used, and apply it to your resume and cover letters. Buzzwords can be a great way to catch the eye of the person tasked to pool the most well-matched applications.

4. Remember: Skills are Transferrable

When you’re looking over your resume and your skills, don’t take your skill sets for granted. All skills are transferrable (another great point made by Jocelyn) and you can almost always find a way to apply skills you used in one role to the role you’re applying for or the new direction you’re headed in your career. Use the buzzwords mentioned above to describe your responsibilities at previous positions and in your cover letter, explain how your acquired skills can be applied to your new role.

All in all, when you’re focused on making a change in your career, keep in mind that it is going to be a learning process. Do your best not to get frustrated. Instead, use the resources at your disposal, and remain inspired. Think about how far you’ve come, what you know, and how you can use that to your advantage in this next chapter!

Allison is a former Creative Circle Account Executive, with a background in creative writing, content writing/strategy, publishing, and business development. Her world revolves around words and the relationships and interactions they inspire. Allison is now the Content Specialist at Raizlabs, a design and development firm in Boston and San Francisco.

I’ve been on the job hunt for a while now. And I’m still not where I want to be. The feeling that has surfaced most continuously throughout this process has been frustration. With my aimlessless, my lack of a larger goal to work towards, comes a frustration that seethes out of every pore and oft infects my days with vexing irritability. I feel like a knight trying to figure out how to get to a castle with no idea of what the castle looks like, no way to spot it out on the horizon, and thus no way to determine the best path towards it.

Beyond this base level aggravation, one of the most stress-inducing parts of the job hunt has been relaxation. Now you might be thinking, “Isn’t that nonsensical?” Well, yes and no.

Right now, my spare time is when I’m not a) at my first internship, b) at my second internship, c) trying to get to said internships in absurd Los Angeles traffic, d) doing work for one after getting home from the other, e) music blogging, f) working on side projects, or g) planning/thinking about other projects I want to start. And for my sanity, I carve out time for rejuvenation: tv watching, cooking, painting, music making, reading, etc.

And between all of that, I still have to look for a job. Needless to say, how I use my spare time has become very important.

I tried searching for jobs in the morning before work, after dinner after work, and at different times during the weekend. I found that job searching before work conflicts with my ability to go on morning walk/ get the green time necessary for a happy and healthy Nina. After work, I rarely have the zeal to look because I’m both tired from work and too preoccupied with other work still to be done. Looking on weekend evenings made me feel somehow more hopeless (likely because I was home on a Saturday night not with my friends but looking for a job). Finally, I found that the mornings were best because the weekend calm coupled with the balm of soft morning light allowed me to feel most hopeful and energetic in my search.

Dedicating time to the job hunt is not easy, especially when it feels like there is always something more I can do – more of myself I can give – to the commitments already in my life. Everything feels important, but in the end, it just feels that way.

I’m trying to retrain my brain not to take on a thousand projects at one time, but to draw attention to those that both help others out the most and feed me and my growth. I’m trying to learn how to prioritize, to give myself smaller to-do lists that are actually accomplishable, and to not beat myself up if I don’t get everything done that I want because I’m human and we only have so much brain capacity and so much time.

Keywords: I’m trying.

Meet Nina, a recent graduate of a liberal arts college, with many passions, interests, and skills…and no job. We invite you to join her (and commiserate) as she struggles wading through the post-graduate swamp world. A creative at heart, and most likely a mermaid in another life, when she is not at the pool, she can be found writing, reviewing music for The Wild Honey Pie and OurVinyl, making art with her friends, goofing around on Photoshop, cooking, or frolicking amongst foliage while dreaming of how to save the planet from destruction by human hands.

Networking events and industry meet-ups are always being recommended to me as the best way to integrate myself into the community I want to be a part of.

Being a shy thing, on top of being introverted, I find the idea of such shindigs terrifying and unappealing. However, I had a moment of feeling brave and was willing to take some risks in the hope of making some new connections. So I decided to journey down to Sassafras, a bar in Hollywood, for an event supposed to help connect those in the baby ranks of the entertainment industry.

As I walked there, straightening my skirt and tucking wisps of hair behind my ears, I tried to amp myself up: “You can do this. Take it step by step, you don’t have to become best buds with everyone in there. Your goal is to talk to one person. You got this. It’s only one person. Once you get into a one-on-one conversation, you’ll be fine. You can handle this.”

I took some deep breaths as the bouncer checked my ID and I stepped inside the dimly lit two-story room.

And in an instant, I was ready to bolt right back out the door.

The place was stuffed to the gills, humming like the drone of an overactive beehive, and people hung together tightly in clusters with little room for new members. Claustrophobic and easily overwhelmed by massive cacophonous sound, I decided the best strategy was to get to the quiet serenity of a hopefully empty bathroom and to make a real strategy from there.

Heart beating with a mixture of fear and embarrassment, I struggled through the crowds taking over the small aisle between the bar and the wall that led to the restrooms. Once there, questions flooded my mind: “How was I supposed to figure out what cluster of people to join? How do I even nudge myself in? Is there a way to do this not awkwardly? Do I get a drink and hope to meet people at the bar that will invite me to follow them back to their cluster? If that doesn’t work, I can’t stand at against the wall by myself with a drink.”

And then I’m back at the start of trying to spark a conversation with a stranger. I quickly realized a major flaw in my plan had been not bringing someone along who could have at least hung back with me while we navigated these high school clique-esque clusters.

Uncomfortable with any other option, I forced myself back through the fissures between shoulders. I would turn my head about in a last ditch effort to maybe catch a friendly eye, but when my gaze was predictably unreturned, I continued my fight through the crowd until I finally reached the refreshingly free air on the outside of the bar.

“Another time,” I said to myself as I walked back to my car that had only been parked for ten to fifteen minutes at the most. “Or maybe never again.”

Meet Nina, a recent graduate of a liberal arts college, with many passions, interests, and skills…and no job. We invite you to join her (and commiserate) as she struggles through the post-graduate swamp world. A creative at heart, and most likely a mermaid in another life, when she is not at the pool, she can be found writing, reviewing music for The Wild Honey Pie and OurVinyl, making art with her friends, goofing around on Photoshop, cooking, or frolicking amongst foliage while dreaming of how to save the planet from destruction by human hands.

My process began, and continues, with questions. I am constantly questioning (myself, life, etc.), so the job-hunting process was bound to be no different.

Not knowing what I want – being attracted to a million different life paths and career options, and not having enough time try them all out – I figured the next best option was to ask someone else what I want.

I decided to turn my perceived notion of the informational interview on its head: instead of it being a time for someone else to get a sense of whether I might be a good fit for their company, I used it as an opportunity to quiz others about whether their job position would be a good fit for me.

I will be completely honest, I still have no idea what an informational interview is or what it is supposed to look like. It remains a mystical fuzzy concept of something theoretically helpful.

I spoke with a screenwriter, a music blog founder, a film and music-making fellow Haverford grad, a television writer, a music supervisor, and a music booker, to name a few. Despite the variety of jobs they had all held, the conversations went roughly the same way. I probed about the job, its particulars, the lifestyle it entailed, and about the path that got them to their job. And in the end, they all said something to the effect of “there is no one path in arts or entertainment.”

I wanted to protest, “You mean you don’t have an answer for me? You mean there is no answer? What?” I wanted to fume, I wanted to angrily gesticulate in usual Italian fashion at the heavens, and stomp away in search of a sage that might appease me.

It only took three or so of these “informational interviews” to realize that this reaction not only wouldn’t get me anywhere, but also was completely ill-founded. My assumptions were problematic in two ways: I wanted the answer and I was relying on others to tell me what I could only figure out myself.

There isn’t an answer that is just hiding from me until I work hard enough to discover it, like a pearl tucked inside an intricately folded handkerchief. Unlike the previous 2+ decades of my life, which were guided by schedule and structures that built the path in front of me as I went, from here on out, there are endless possible paths for me to take.

Although I can’t rely on such tests to give me the answer, or even my answer, the interviews weren’t useless. There were tidbits about each job that attracted me to certain options and others that repulsed me, reminding me of the importance of intuition in the whole process.

They also taught me that the job I may want might not exist; I may have to go out there and make it myself.

Meet Nina, a recent graduate of a liberal arts college, with many passions, interests, and skills…and no job. We invite you to join her (and commiserate) as she struggles wading through the post-graduate swamp world. A creative at heart, and most likely a mermaid in another life, when she is not at the pool, she can be found writing, reviewing music for The Wild Honey Pie and OurVinyl, making art with her friends, goofing around on Photoshop, cooking, or frolicking amongst foliage while dreaming of how to save the planet from destruction by human hands.