Since writing the How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist series, I’ve gotten occasional e-mails from journalists who are looking to change careers asking me for advice on their résumés and cover letters. I always feel kind of embarrassed when I respond. I hope they don’t think I’ve got the magic bullet or anything. Really, the only person I know how to write a cover letter for is me.

However, there are some things that I see over and over again in these cover letters, so I figure I’ll write them down here. My cover-letter advice for journalists looking to change careers always boils down to this:

Use your cover letter to explain why you would make a good [fill in blank with whatever job you're applying for].

It sounds simple and reasonable enough, yet many of the cover letters I’ve seen fail to do this. Often, they give a myriad of reasons why the journalist applying for a particular job would make, well, a good journalist. They rattle off experiences, awards, and job responsibilities that would sound impressive to people in journalism, but mean relatively little to outsiders. The fact that you’ve covered 10 World Series, six Final Fours, and seven NBA Finals tells me you’re a very experienced sports journalist, but it doesn’t tell me how good a fit you would be for the non-journalism job you’re applying for, where you won’t be covering any of that stuff.

The advice I always give for tweaking such cover letters is to talk less about your past experiences and responsibilities, and more about how what skills you acquired from those experiences, what skills you used to do those jobs, and how those skills would translate over to the non-journalism job you’re applying for. To me, focusing on experience and job responsibilities is mostly counterproductive in this situation, because you are trying to change professions, so your experience and past job responsibilities will most likely pale in comparison to people who have been working in the field you’re trying to jump to. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have equal or better skills. The key, then, is to show prospective employers how you demonstrated said skills in your current and past jobs and how those skills would translate over to the job you’re applying for.

For example, the fact that you were a preps editor for a decade doesn’t tell me why you’d be a good anything other than a preps editor. But the fact that as preps editor, you had to maintain good relationships with a myriad of local coaches, parents, and players, juggle all those competing interests, and stay on good terms with them even though you sometimes write negative pieces about them could be cited as a demonstration of your people skills, which could be useful if you’re applying for a job that involves interacting with the public or clients.

There you go. That’s the one tip I have to offer for cover letters. The only other advice I can give is that your cover letter should explain why this particular job appeals to you. People know traditional media is in financial trouble and that many journalists are trying to get out. You have to show a prospective employer that you are genuinely interested in the position for reasons other than that it’s a lifeboat off a sinking ship.