When you are changing careers, it’s important that your resume explain to your new employer why you would be a good fit for the role, even if you’ve never done the job before.

Responsibilities from your previous job might relate to requirements for a new role, even if the job title or the tasks aren’t an exact match. The process of explaining why skills from a previous job would fit well into a new one is called “skills translation.” The best way to translate your skills is to use the job description as a template, just like when you write a customized resume.

Read over the job description carefully. Any time a specific skills is mentioned, make sure that skill is included on your resume. Many times, the employer is more interested in knowing what skills you have and what tasks you’d be suited for than if you have tackled the specific problem they are trying to hire for. They want to learn about what you’ve done in the past, and how you’re going to bring those skills to bear in the future. Using the same language as the job description to describe those skills is how you’ll convince the reader that you can do the job.

You may have to do some work for the employer. There are also lots of skills like customer service, sales, technical support, and project management that translate well across industries. If the job description calls for these skills, re-write your bullets so that you highlight those skills in light of your previous experience. The job description might not call for a background in customer service explicitly, but if it’s a customer-facing role, you’ll probably want to bring up that you have successfully worked face-to-face with customers in the past.

Finally, you may be coming from an industry that the employer is unfamiliar with, so don’t expect them to understand what you did in your previous job. For example, if you were a military veteran who worked on vehicle maintenance, an employer might not understand that your role involved managing people, strategizing logistics, and balancing complex timelines. In a role that involved project management, all of those skills would be extremely relevant (and much more valuable than your ability to work on engines). Highlight the parts of your experience that relate to that job, specifically.