Ask Devin

This is amazing, and congratulations in advance for your new role (absolutely speaking it into existence!). I also want to say that career breaks are way more common than we talk about, and they don’t have to be a disadvantage when you frame your past experience with a little intention and strategy. That said, I’d highly recommend leaning into your transferable skills. Before my current role, I actually never had a position that was entirely internal comms. It was always the “other duties as assigned,” and because of the nature of internal comms, well… it was pretty hard to pull together a portfolio.

So! What was most helpful for me while interviewing, especially when I was trying to explain work that didn’t always have a neat title attached to it, was talking about my philosophy behind internal comms — things like sourcing and curating content for distribution, channel strategy and message prioritization, my approach to engaging busy employees, creative ideas for employee engagement overall, etc. One place to start is by mapping your past work in sales and business development to communications outcomes — storytelling, stakeholder management, influence, clarity, and relationship-building all translate extremely well. And because you’ve worked at multinational companies, you’ve likely already done work that supports communicating with distributed, global teams across time zones and cultures, which is a huge part of internal comms in the U.S. market.

Equally, I expressed a huge interest in AI (this may be pretty niche, because I was largely interviewing for roles in the tech space), but it served me well to think about the “future of comms” and how I wanted to remain people-first.

I’ll also link another question that I answered recently about niche job boards. LinkedIn is great, but I found great success on some other platforms too! Happy searching!