Many professors find the shift from academic to corporate work intimidating and difficult. 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. Because you’re basically changing your industry, you might lack the experiences of competitors in your new field even if some of your basic skills are the same.

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. Regardless of how much experience you’d had in your professor job, you’ve probably got a history of calculating figures, budget management, team building, management, and projecting outcomes, and these are vital experiences. 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. Therefore, use this space to show real accomplishments that make you a viable, interesting candidate.

How do you get this done? As mentioned above, you’re looking for any sort of experience that lines up with the executive level position 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). You want to dig as deeply as possible to explain why you’re a good fit for the prospective position. As both a professor and an executive, you need to make your accomplishments shine, so there’s no excuse for giving less than your best.

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. But this is the time to explore this side of yourself, because if you don’t know who you are, there’s no way that you can successfully sell yourself as a professor turned executive.

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