How to Translate Your Ministry Experience for Corporate Jobs: Step-by-Step Guide for Former Pastors (part 2)

♟️ STRATEGY SHIFT: Words to use on your resume as a former pastor

How do you know which words to use?

The purpose of using the correct wording is twofold:

First, you’ll likely apply to some jobs that use an ATS (applicant tracking system). Those systems automatically filter resumes looking for keywords that show up in the resumes of people with desired experience.

Second, the words you use will either set off alarm bells that yell “do not hire, they don’t know what they’re doing!” or they will create the feeling of confidence that they should get to know you better, regardless of your pastor experience.

Here are two sets of words that you should change in your experience.

1. Words you should always change. We’ve created a list of 41 of these that you can download for FREE here. This is pretty black and white, and that will be your quick win for today.

2. Words specific to the job title you want next. Transitioning out of ministry requires explaining your words in ways that make sense for your new career. Think: same concept as what you did in last week’s exercise, but using new wording to describe it for a new, secular job context.

This is Step 1. Understanding the context and language of the hiring team and rewording your experience to make it make sense.

Step number 2 is to use a word cloud generator to take the 3 job descriptions you chose last week and find the most common words in those job descriptions.

Step 3, transform your explanation of what you have done into words and phrases that would mean the same thing… but if you were in their context.

Let’s look at the examples from last week:

Community Pastor targeting Customer Success Manager

• "Managing and growing relationships with key customers, acting as their primary point of contact."
  Instead of saying “volunteers leading community groups,” you might say “key customers” or “key stakeholders."

• "Gathering customer feedback and communicating product improvement suggestions to the development team."
  Instead of saying, “told the production team what needed improvement,” you might say, “communicated product and service improvements to the appropriate teams.”

Now… Don’t lie. Obviously. Don’t put stuff on your resume that you haven’t done.

There will be some technical experience you may not have. It is what it is. You can choose to either upskill in that area, which takes time, find a similar job without as many technical requirements, or apply and hope for the best.

Structure the resume bullets in “Impact Bullet” formatting.

Once the wording is finished, we have to structure the bullet correctly. We call this an Impact Bullet.

Similar to the plumber, we want to show not just what we have done, but the impact of what we have done. Here’s what the Impact Bullet formula looks like:

For each bullet, align an action with a corresponding result.

Then add metrics. Metrics can be an increase or decrease in a number, percentage, dollar amount, or time. Also, you can talk about a change over time.

Bullets structured in this way catch the eye of the resume reader and prove that you’re not just talking, but you’ve actually done what you say you can do.