Executive assistant CV guides · by Lily Shippen, EA recruiter

An executive assistant CV with no EA experience: how career changers get shortlisted

Written by Lily Shippen, founder of the Lily Shippen EA, PA and chief of staff recruitment agency. Thirteen years of shortlisting, tens of thousands of CVs read, and every rule on this page is one I use at my own desk. Who I am

Some of the best EAs I've placed had never been called one before I met them, including a client services manager from a private bank, a hotel duty manager, a paralegal and a military officer's staff assistant, and what they had in common was that their previous job had been an EA's job under another name while their first CV hid that completely. I remember reading one of them and nearly passing, until a line on page two made me go back to the top, and that line should have been the first thing on the page.

So this guide is about how to stop hiding it.

First, find the EA work you've already done

Go through your last two roles and mark every task that fits one of the headings below, and I promise there are more than you think, even though you'll feel as though you're stretching when you aren't.

• Access and priorities covers anywhere you decided what reached someone senior, made things happen on their behalf or said no for them.
• Diary, travel and logistics at scale means managing other people's time, movement or deadlines, especially across teams or time zones.
• Senior stakeholder contact is being the first point of contact for clients, partners, a board, a headteacher, a consultant or a commanding officer.
• Money is any budget you held, spend you approved or supplier you negotiated with.
• Events and meetings is anything you organised that other people turned up to.
• Confidential material includes payroll, HR, legal, medical and financial information, because if you handled it, you were trusted with it.
• Fixing a process is anything that works better because you changed it.

Every one of these is something I shortlist an EA for, and you've simply been doing them under a different job title.

Then translate, don't apologise

The most common mistake I see on a career changer's CV is an opening line that explains the gap, something like "Although I have not worked as an EA, I believe my skills are transferable", because the moment you write "although" my eye goes looking for the problem you've just pointed at. I know it comes from honesty, but it reads as doubt, so translate instead by taking each task you marked and rewriting it as an EA would describe it, with the scale attached.

Notice that nothing was invented in either rewrite, because the figures were always true and the CV simply stopped leaving them out, and in the second version of each I can see the office, the scale and the trust, which means I can see an EA.

What to put where

1. The profile states the move plainly, in one clause, and then evidences it, along the lines of "I am moving into an executive assistant role because the parts of my job I am best at are the whole of an EA's job", followed by the proof in the next sentence, and there's a worked example in the profile examples.
2. Key achievements come before experience, as a short list of four to six lines that each carry a figure and are each chosen because they're EA work, so that this section does the translating before I reach your job titles.
3. Within each role, the EA work goes first, which means reordering the bullets so access, diary, stakeholders and money sit at the top while the parts of the job that don't transfer sit at the bottom or go entirely.
4. Skills with context, and systems by name, because "Diaries: three partners and 40 client meetings a week" is a skills line I can read the level from, and if you've used Outlook, Google Workspace, Concur, SAP, Salesforce, a booking platform or a board portal then say so, since recruiters and software both search for them.

Which backgrounds transfer best

In my experience the moves that work most often come from client services and account management, hospitality management, paralegal and legal secretary roles, HR and office management, the armed forces, teaching and school administration, and events, because in each of those the EA skill set is already the core of the job. If you're coming from somewhere else entirely the same method applies, and you may just have to look a little harder for the seven headings above, though I'd still back you to find them.

What not to do

• Don't invent a title, because "Executive assistant (informal)" fools nobody and costs you trust at interview, which is a terrible trade.
• Don't write a functional CV that hides your job titles, because recruiters distrust them and the software that stores CVs reads them badly.
• Don't lead with a course, because a two-day EA certificate is a fine line under Professional Development but it isn't the reason anyone shortlists you.

How the scorer treats a career changer

The free scorer is built to read transferable evidence generously, because that's how I read it, so it doesn't mark you down for lacking the job title but marks the evidence instead and tells you which EA lines to move up. When Margot writes a CV from an interview she asks the same questions she asks an experienced EA, because the answers are what matter rather than the title on the last payslip, and the template shows the structure that makes translated experience read as senior. You've done the work already, so let the page say so.

Lily Shippen

FOUNDER, LILY SHIPPEN, EA, PA AND CHIEF OF STAFF RECRUITMENT · THIRTEEN YEARS PLACING EAS

Lily has read tens of thousands of EA CVs and shortlisted the ones that worked. Margot is her screening interview, written down. About Lily and this site