You’ve spent years building real skills. You collaborated with teams, solved problems under pressure, learned new tools, and figured out how to communicate across different groups of people. Now you’re making a move into tech, and suddenly it can feel like none of that counts.
It does. You just have to learn how to say so.
That was the core message of Flatiron’s Tech Resume Lab, a workshop designed for career changers who are working toward roles in AI engineering, software engineering, or cybersecurity. Here’s what we covered, and how you can put it to work.
The Skills Employers Actually Want from AI Engineers
Before you can translate your background, it helps to understand what you’re translating it into. AI engineer is one of the most in-demand roles in tech, emerging from the convergence of software engineering and data science/ML. The technical foundation matters, and it’s what you’ll build in our work-integrated program.
Beyond technical qualifications, employers are also looking for transferable skills, an area where career changers have an edge.
Here are six of them:
Problem framing: The ability to take a vague situation and break it down into a clear, solvable question. Teachers do this when a lesson isn’t landing. Servers do it when a table is unhappy. Analysts do it every time they get a vague request. If you’ve ever had to figure out what the actual problem was before you could fix it, you’ve built this skill.
Communication and storytelling: Technical work still has to be explained. If you’ve ever trained a new colleague, presented findings to a team, or written documentation that other people relied on, you’ve been doing this all along.
Responsible AI literacy: This is about thinking through fairness, bias, and unintended consequences. It’s not just about AI systems specifically. A teacher thinking about which students might get left behind is exercising the same instinct. A server thinking about how to treat every table with equal attention. An instinct for equity and accountability is exactly what this skill is built on.
Iterative experimentation: If you’ve ever tried something, measured what happened, and adjusted your approach, you’ve built this muscle. Coaches, project managers, campaign planners, and teachers all work this way.
Cross-functional collaboration: Working with people who have different priorities and different ways of seeing a problem is something technical teams genuinely struggle with. If you’ve bridged that gap before, you have something they need. Understanding the perspective of a co-worker on a different team and building a process where you can speak the same language is valuable.
Domain knowledge: Whatever field you’re coming from, you carry industry knowledge and expertise. You know the workflows, the edge cases, and what actually matters to people in that world. This is directly valuable, especially if you’re staying in the same sector.
Building Your Transferable Skills Map
Once you see what employers are looking for, the next step is auditing what you already have.
A simple exercise that works:
- Create a three-column grid for each role you’ve held, whether full-time, part-time, freelance, volunteer, or project-based.
- Label the columns “What I liked,” “What I didn’t enjoy,” and “Why I moved on.” Fill it out for at least two or three roles.
- When you read down each column, patterns emerge.
The things you liked across multiple roles point toward the skills you want to lean into. The things you didn’t like show what you were looking for that you weren’t getting. The reasons you moved on can reveal motivations that are themselves transferable.
The goal is to identify the skills underneath those responsibilities and give them language you can use.
Ask yourself: How does what I’ve done before offer value in a role I haven’t had yet? That’s the bridge you’re building.
Six High-Impact Changes to Your Resume and LinkedIn
Once you have your skills map, you need to communicate it effectively. There are a lot of best practices out there for resume and LinkedIn optimization, but these six changes move the needle most for career changers.
1. Rewrite your headline to lead with where you’re going. Your headline should reflect the role you’re pursuing, not just what you’ve done. This is true on LinkedIn and in your resume’s top section. You’re not hiding your background. You’re framing it in context of your next move.
2. Tell the transition story in your About section. Acknowledge where you came from, explain what you’re building toward, and connect the two. Be honest, be confident, and make it searchable. Recruiters and hiring managers will respect the directness.
3. Add a Featured section with proof of work. For anyone in a technical program, this means your capstone project and any other work you can link. For everyone else, it means portfolios, writing, freelance work, or projects. Make it easy for someone to click and see your skills in action.
4. Frame your transferable skills in language that lands for the role you want. This is the hardest part and the most important one. Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- Instead of “answered customer calls and resolved complaints for 5 years,” try “managed high-volume customer escalations, diagnosing root causes and implementing solutions that reduced repeat contacts.”
- Instead of “ran an after-school program,” try “coordinated a 40-student after-school program across 3 grade levels, managing schedules, volunteer staff, and weekly activity plans while maintaining 95% attendance rates.”
- Instead of “coordinated schedules for the department,” try “managed scheduling and resource allocation for a 15-person team across 3 locations, reducing scheduling conflicts by 40% after implementing a shared tracking system.”
Same experience. Completely different signal to a recruiter.
5. Lead with impact, not just tasks. Don’t just describe what you did. Show why it mattered and at what scale. “Processed 300+ monthly transactions with 99% accuracy” tells a much fuller story than “entered data into the system.” Numbers, percentages, and scope give your work context.
6. Name the tools you used. Even if the specific tool doesn’t match what a company uses, naming it shows you work within systems and know how to get things done with technology. “Updated account notes and pipeline in Salesforce” is more useful than “maintained CRM records.”
Keep Updating as You Learn
If you’re currently in a program, every course you complete and every skill you practice is worth adding to your LinkedIn profile. Don’t wait until you graduate. Keeping your skills section current shows momentum and signals to recruiters that you’re actively building.
Don’t forget to ask for recommendations. A colleague, former manager, professor, or classmate who can speak to your work and your character adds third-party validation. LinkedIn makes it easy: the recommendation lives on your profile and does the work for you.
What Makes You Unique and Memorable
Here’s the last piece, and it matters: keep your story specific to you.
Career changers often worry that an unusual background will work against them. In practice, the opposite is true. The details that feel like they don’t fit are often what people remember. If you started your career in a completely different field, lead with it. Own it. Explain what you built there and how it connects to where you’re headed. Generic career narratives blur together. A story with texture sticks.
This matters especially when you’re being matched with an employer partner. Employers already know you’re building technical skills through the program. What they want to understand is what you bring beyond that: how you think, how you work within a team, and what perspective you carry from your previous career.
Make sure your resume and LinkedIn don’t just show what you’ve done. Frame your transferable skills in a way that feels relevant to the people reading them.
The goal isn’t to look like every other candidate. It’s to be the candidate a hiring manager can picture clearly, and remember.
