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

♟️ STRATEGY SHIFT: How to show your marketable skills as a former pastor.

This strategy has three parts.

1. Get clarity on the job type you will move into next.

2. Use P.A.R.T.S. to identify your relevant job experience.

3. Translate the relevant actions of your job, rather than the functions of your job - using the “Impact Bullet Formula.”

For this issue, I’m going to focus on number 2.

So what are the P.A.R.T.S of a job description?

• P = Problems. What are the problems that the person doing this job will solve? Who will they solve it for? Where do those problems come from?

• A = Actions. What actions will the person doing this job be expected to perform in order to solve those problems?

• R = Results. What results will be considered successful if the person completes the actions?

• T = Technical Knowledge/Expertise. What technical knowledge or expertise is required to perform the actions that will yield successful results?

• S = Soft Skills. What soft skills will make the person in this role successful when it comes to engaging with the team and customers?

If you understand these, you understand the nuance, the context, and the culture of what you would be translating.

This may require some additional research (I recorded this video for the Interview Accelerator on how to do deep research on a company before applying for a job).

How do you use P.A.R.T.S. to translate your experience?

1. Find 3 job descriptions for your Top Job Type. The title and level of the job matter. You can find these on Google Jobs or LinkedIn Jobs pretty easily. 

2. Copy and paste these into a document so you don’t lose them if the job posting closes.

3. Use an AI tool like our P.A.R.T.S. Breakdown Tool (Access the FREE AI tool here) to upload those job descriptions and find common themes and language.

4. Now that you have the P.A.R.T.S. of a typical role, look at each point and answer the question, “Have I done that or not?”

5. Write out what you did in your job history that matches each point in your own words. Continue through the entire list.

Now you have all of your job experience that is relevant to your Top Job Type.

Let’s look at an example:

Community Pastor targeting Customer Success Manager

• "Managing and growing relationships with key customers, acting as their primary point of contact."
  Have you done that? ✅
  Now you’d write: “I’ve been the primary point of contact for every volunteer leading community groups with the responsibility of growing those relationships so that they have everything they need to do their role well.

• "Gathering customer feedback and communicating product improvement suggestions to the development team."
  Have you done that? ✅
  Now you’d write: “I’ve used surveys and called attendees of our group meetings to hear their feedback and then communicated that to the team that executes the events and gatherings.”

Voila! You’ve just started step 1 of translating your experience.

Step 2 is structuring the bullet correctly with the correct wording. All of that coming in next week’s issue.