With job opportunities running scarce these days, employees are finding themselves having to be quite creative, essentially creating suitable positions for their skills. This could be something fairly simple, like teaching courses related to your work at a training center or writing articles for professional publications. Or you may find you need to make a major leap - from sales to purchasing, for example. 

To go with this new job you just created, you need to "remodel" your experiences, and give your resume a facelift. Of course, your experience will not change, but the way you present it should change according to the opportunity at hand. Depending on the type of job you are applying for, you may need to highlight particular skills or achievements above others. To do this you may well need to change the layout and structure of the resume accordingly.

Let's look at an extreme case: you're a sales executive who finds yourself applying for a purchasing job. You need to position yourself as a likely candidate for the opportunity at hand, without lying or exaggerating your skills and experiences. How do you present yourself - someone whose job has always been to sell - as the perfect person to do the buying? Not an easy task, but doable nonetheless. 

To start with, you need to rewrite your chronological resume, the one that shows your progression through the sales ranks from sales assistant to junior sales executive all the way to sales team leader. The best way to do this is to look at all the accomplishments you have accumulated, and divide them into skill sets. 

Typically, any successful salesperson would have several skills: Negotiation, communication, problem solving and creativity are the most common. Now, look at this list, and think of the purchasing opportunity you, the experienced salesperson, are contemplating: You can see a strong match. After all, someone who is in charge of purchasing in a company would need these same skills to effectively do the job. It may also be an added advantage that a purchasing specialist has a sales background, in order to better deal with the suppliers and their salesmen. Having been on the sales side, you will have an insider's edge, so to speak. 

Going back to the resume, how do you take the skills you have just identified and put them together to formulate a resume? 

The resume you are trying to put together here is a functional one; one that focuses on your achievements within certain skill sets, while downplaying the chronological sequence of the your career. It is the ideal format when you are trying to relate certain experiences, accomplishments and skills from one job to another, when, on the surface, the experience may not seem relevant. 

It is not enough, however, to simply rearrange your accomplishments under skill headings. Placing emphasis on the more important skills is also essential. For example, in the sales-to-purchasing example, it is more important to highlight negotiation skills than the ability to achieve a preset sales target. It is also more important to stress problem-solving skills and effective communication, than it is to highlight generating new leads. The latter is important in order to form an overall picture of your abilities, but the former has a more direct impact on the purchasing job you're applying for. 

Now that you've highlighted your salesperson skills and your accomplishments within these skills, and ordered the skills according to their relevance to the job, you have helped the purchasing manager see you in the light of the purchasing job. The context of your experiences (what job you were actually doing) has become somewhat secondary. By the time the potential employer sees, towards the end of the resume, that you were a pure salesman who has never actually done any purchasing, it won't really matter, because he has already seen the items that matter most.

This playing around with experience - highlighting some points, downplaying others, rearranging items, etc. - can be done in many situations when you have to rework how you present your experience to decrease the gap between an opportunity at hand and your experience. 

The key is to look at the skills you've been using in one career area, then look at those required for the new one you're interested in and highlight the common ones. 

The way the job market is looking these days, survival will be for the most creative.