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 of what you did in last week’s exercise, but using new wording to describe it for a new context, 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.