Applying to roles beyond academic research will require you to think differently about how you present yourself both in the application process and at interview. Fortunately, Cambridge researchers have a wealth of skills and experiences to help them navigate this changed point of view.
This section will direct you to resources that will help explain how these applications differ from the academic ones you may be used to, particularly focusing on you being able to describe your motivation for these roles, and supporting you to create your application and prepare for interview.
In addition to this information, you can also book a 1-1 appointment to have your application reviewed or to prepare for interview.
The main resource for applications is our CV and Cover Letter book. Find this on Handshake. You’ll need to look particularly at the examples from p50 onwards.
For interviews, we recommend our YouTube playlist.
Your key task as you start assembling your application is to really understand the new role. You might have already spoken with the recruiting employer or other people in similar roles to help you get into the new industry mindset. Perhaps you’ve done some reading around the sector, attended a talk or been to another event. This would all be good background to be support your reading of the job ad.
You are aiming to find out where your research skills and experience, and perhaps your knowledge and expertise, will fit with the new role. As well, you need to figure out how the new team operates and what the purpose of this specific job is.
Watch this video ‘Assessing Job Ads’ (27 minutes) to help really dig deep into understanding this ‘matching’ process. It is aimed at roles in life science R&D but the principles apply across all sectors. Do not be put off if you don’t at first glance have all the skills on the list: it is rare for employers to find the perfect candidate!
Your starting point for the CV is the employer’s job description. Take some time going through it, and think back through all your various experiences to be able to pull together effective examples that match what the new employer is looking for. Have in mind this structure for your examples (this will help both in application documents as well as interview answers):
- Context
- Action
- Result
Think carefully about your use of language: depending how closely similar the role is to your current one, you may be able to retain technical terms but generally you will need to restrict your use of academic jargon. Try to pin down some evidence to help provide some detail for the effectiveness of these skills: whether your codebook is still being used; how well your students did; nomination for a teaching award and so on.
Our CVs and Cover Letters Book, will help with this preparation.
Our video ‘Highlighting Relevant Skills’ (8 minutes, particularly from 6 minutes in) will help you think about how your skills in academia ‘translate’ into a different context.
This figure, taken from the CV and Cover Letters book, p57, also helps illustrate how you can start to think about your academic work in new ways:
Once you’ve identified where you feel you closely match the job description, it is time to organise your material into sections on the CV. You are likely to have fewer sections than you may be used to in an academic CV. Think about your use of headings, taking inspiration from the job description. For example, rather than just including ‘Education’ or ‘Work Experience’, you may want to use:
- Research Experience
- Relevant Skills
- Relevant Teaching Experience
- Outreach Experience
- Other Experience
Additionally, you may have a section for Referees, Technical Skills, or Recent Training, as well as Education and Personal Details. If you are staying in a relatively adjacent role, where academic publications, conference attendance and funding received are well-understood, you would want to highlight the most important of these also.
A Profile section may be particularly relevant if you are changing sectors: limit yourself to three bullet points that clearly highlight how you are suitable for the new role, to encourage the recruiter to read on.
You may have heard about ‘tailoring your CV’. This means changing your CV for each role that you apply to: changing the evidence you use, updating the Profile bullet points or reordering sections according to the new job’s priorities. You may need to use different language if one employer describes their role in a different way from another.
This may seem time-consuming, but the work that you do to understand the requirements of the role will never be wasted – it is always useful at interview - and it is likely that you will soon build up a bank of a few CVs that you can quickly adapt.
If you prefer to watch rather than read, the videos on the ‘Applications for non-research roles’ playlist give more details to support your CV writing.
Don’t forget, you can also book a 1-1 appointment to have your application reviewed.
If your CV is a list of skills and experiences you have gained in the past – closely matching what the employer is looking for, of course – then the Cover Letter or Personal Statement is your chance to show what you would do in the future, for the new employer. It’s your opportunity to show why you are the right person for their role, and why it’s the right role for you.
We recommend the following structure:
- Why are you applying now?
- Why are you interested in this company and this role?
- What do you bring to the job – i.e. how do you match what they are looking for?
- Summarise and show a match with their values
You can apply this to both a cover letter and a personal statement. The latter allows more space to really go into detail about how you match the job description. In a cover letter you would highlight just three or four key priority matches, directing the recruiter to your CV where you would have provided evidence for the rest.
Watch our Cover Letter Transferable Skills video (16 minutes), to find out more about writing cover letters.
There are some great sample cover letters in the CVs and Cover Letters book, particularly on pages 76 and 77
Your Cover Letter or Personal Statement is an opportunity to really pull together your thinking about the role and to demonstrate everything you have to offer a new employer.
If you use generative AI such as ChatGPT for help with writing your applications, don’t forget to personalise the text you get out of it and ensure it’s specifically relevant to the particular job you are applying to. Read more advice in our blog
Make sure that you’ve checked your written language, use active verbs and evidence where you can, and leave the employer feeling enthusiastic about meeting you at interview by demonstrating your motivation to work for them (see below for more advice on how to do that).
Don’t forget, you can also book a 1-1 appointment to have your application reviewed.
Essentially, interviews are a chance for the employer to check
- Can you do the job – do you possess the necessary skills and experience?
- Will you do the job – are you interested in and motivated by our work?
- Are you the right person for our job – will you ‘fit’ in our company?
We have heaps of tips available for you on our YouTube channel (timings vary). You might like to take a look at the standard advice we give, on our general pages, particularly working through the ‘Different Stages and Types of Interview’ section.
You can use generative AI to help you identify possible questions, based on the job description and competencies being required. Read our blog post to discover how to do that.
Don’t forget to have prepared some questions to ask the employer yourself. You could identify some questions by comparing the employers’ competitors, perhaps, clarify the training and development offer, or ask what previous role-holders have gone on to do. Use words such as ‘generally’, ‘usually’ or ‘often’ to depersonalise your questions. Make sure that anything you ask is authentic and couldn’t easily be found by a search of the employer’s website.
Finally, remember that the interview is also a chance for you to decide if this role and this employer is the right place for you. It’s possible that the way you are treated, what you sense about the relationships between the interview panel, or the environment and location do not work for you. You don’t have to accept a job right away and you could ask for a further follow-up conversation or to meet more members of the team, before giving your decision.
The best way to prepare for an interview is to practice. Book a 1:1 appointment to set up a practice interview with a careers consultant or use one of our virtual platforms. The more you hear yourself talk about yourself, the less it will feel awkward in the real interview.
Treat any feedback you get from the interview panel very seriously: it is rare to have feedback from people that don’t know you and you can often learn a lot about how you appear to others from this valuable source.
As we’ve said above, one of the key ways you’ll demonstrate motivation is to show how your skills and experiences closely match what the new job requires. Perhaps too, you’ve been able to reflect back the employer’s language, the order in which they’ve prioritised the skills they are recruiting against, or give examples that make sense in the particular industry context.
You will also need to include a paragraph somewhere in your cover letter or personal statement and be able to articulate in your interview, the key reasons why this particular job, in this particular organisation, in this particular sector appeals to you.
The first four minutes of this video Career Change - Applications for non-research roles are a helpful guide to how this works.
It’s particularly important when you’re moving sectors, that you highlight the ‘pull’ factors towards the new role, rather than focusing on the ‘push’ factors away from your current one.
Evidence you could give includes:
- Having spoken to the recruiting employer: make sure you mention this in your application somewhere!
- Meeting other people in similar roles or organisations, through events or independently
- Mentioning the blogs you read, people you follow online, podcasts you’ve listened to
- How the new organisation’s values match your own
- Your connection with the sector more generally.
Practice answering ‘why do you want this job’ so that it comes across as fluent and deliberately meant. Your evidence of motivation will be a key differentiator between your application and other candidates’.