Hello, and what a great opportunity to join a space devoted to chatting about your career!
I recently resigned from a position held for 16 years. The passion and drive was long gone. My desire to pivot within my organization had been there for years, but I felt a tremendous sense of loyalty to my awesome manager. Once he was "shown the door," I realized the time had come for me to pursue my passion. My career passion entails a pivot to a discipline I worked in almost 20 years ago and I am unsure how to effectively emphasize this experience as relevant in my current search process.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
How exciting, congratulations on this big milestone! I'm sure it's been a bit bumpy in the recent years but it sounds like this chaotic world is really putting some pieces together and you're seeing it clearly!!
One thing that, if you're not already doing this, might inspire some great clarification is to think of your skills less as tasks and more as the brain functions and patterns that make you really good at them. This is a random example but lets say a secretary is really good at taking meeting notes and distributing a well-organized summary to the right people. On a resume that might not seem like much. But the skills being used are the ability to comprehend and distill the conversation, picking out the important information and communicating it to the appropriate audience for their own application. When you think of it that way, it can be easier to link that to other tasks like within journalism or data analysis.
Take some inventory of how the work you did 20 years ago helped you be better at the role you are pivoting out of too! That might help you further with connecting the two and expressing how you've built on the necessary skills for the job.
I hope that is helpful to you. Best of luck to you!