From Private Sector to Public Good: Transferring Business Intelligence Skills to a Career in Government
We all want our work to mean something. To feel good about what we do, day in and day out. And if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve decided a career in the public sector, for one reason or another, isn’t doing that for you.
You want to be part of advancing a public good; to have your work contribute to bettering lives, instead of fattening stakeholder’s bottom lines. It doesn’t hurt either that government jobs tend to be stable and have good benefits.
But you also know from working in the private sector that, sometimes, switching careers can be difficult; if you have no experience in a private-sector industry, you’re often required to gain that experience via internships or entry-level positions before getting yourself back into a senior position.
Fortunately, government positions tend to prioritize transferable skills over line items on a resume. No matter where you’re coming from in the private sector, you likely have a variety of transferable skills you can leverage to attain and excel in a government position. In this article, we’ll break down everything you need to know to identify your strengths and leverage them into the position of your dreams.
Let’s break it down.
Picking The Right Career Path For You
Once you know you want to enter a government position, the key is understanding where your passions align and your skill set will fit best. Public service careers tend to cover areas like healthcare, education, law enforcement, and partnerships with nonprofits. Knowing which area of impact is most appealing to you narrows down the pool of potential jobs, providing you with a shorter list of available positions in that industry.
Notably, each of these sectors typically has a variety of open roles for you to choose from. Say you’re interested in jobs that center around employee labor laws; you could transition into a safety inspector job, an OSHA social media manager, or an equal opportunity employment specialist. Better, the salaries for these positions are competitive, even for the private sector.
When browsing through the open positions in your chosen sector, you should compile a short list of jobs that sound interesting, or jobs you believe you have adjacent experience in. At that point, you’re almost ready to enter the market; now, we teach you how to sell yourself to a government audience.
Business Intelligence Skill: Applicable To Government As Well
There’s a reason why when presidents get elected, they usually bring a host of private-sector business leaders into their cabinet. The same business intelligence skills that you would use to succeed in a highly-competitive industry have use cases for government; and if you’re looking to break into a government job, you need to understand the nature of the skills you have and how to sell them.
Government positions tend to prioritize transferable skills over line items on a resume.
Let’s briefly explore some of the classifications of business intelligence, and spin them into cover-letter-worthy lines for hiring managers.
- Interpersonal: I’m an excellent communicator who takes time to understand the thoughts and feelings of co-workers and customers alike.
- Creative: I’m an out-of-the-box thinker who comes up with new solutions to long standing problems.
- Logical-Mathematical: Breaking down data, understanding what it’s trying to tell me, and applying insights to existing processes were all part of my previous job. I let the data drive my decisions, often with great results.
- Spatial: I take time to look at how everything fits together, understanding the role of each employee, practice, and component.
- Intrapersonal: I’m introspective by nature, and when something does go wrong, I carefully consider why and how to prevent it in the future.
When considering your resume of soft skills, tailor your responses to the position you’re hoping to get. For example, if you’re looking to become a safety inspector, you might put your spatial intelligence and interpersonal intelligence skills at the forefront.
Leverage Your Project Management Skills
Finally, we dig into hard skills that are transferable; namely, your project management skills. Whether you were previously in charge of triaging a calendar of assignments for your subordinates, or you have experience taking the lead on a consulting project and communicating with clients, your project management skills will be invaluable in most government positions.
Some of the project management skills you can put at the forefront are:
- Time management: Effective time management is an absolute necessity to ensure projects stay on track; and being a self-driven manager of your own time is extremely appealing to interviewers, especially if you come with concrete examples.
- Problem-solving: No matter what position you’re in or what project you’re working on, there will always be hiccups that you can’t plan for. Being able to confront those issues head on, and agilely work to resolve them, is key.
- Negotiation skills: Being both diplomatic and firm is a delicate balance, one that takes years of training to achieve. As such, good negotiators are hard to find, and valuable once attained.
- Methodology knowledge: Whether you’re used to Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, or Lean, knowledge of project management methodology is widely applicable to just about any industry.
- Leadership: The ability to own a task and see it through to its conclusion. Taking charge, holding yourself and your team accountable, and seeing that the work gets done. This is a core skill for every industry; even and especially government.
These hard skills are widely applicable to just about every government role; selling them correctly is really about tailoring your responses to the position you’re applying for.
With the right mixture of applicable hard and soft skills, you’ll be able to stand taller among your competitors in the hiring pool and land yourself a job that aligns with your skillset and passions.
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