It's never a simple process to move from the academic world to a corporate system. These worlds can be vastly different, requiring different things from their high-level counterparts.

However, being a go-getter, it’s shouldn’t be difficult for you to make the shift from professor to executive if you so desire. It’s just a matter of feeling confident that you can get the job done on either side of the fence.

But if you’re still not sure about how to do it, here are some tips to help you make the transition.

Try a Functional Resume

While some recruiters and employers dislike the functional resume because they feel it doesn’t tell the whole story, this is still a good route to take when making a shift from the academic to corporate world. You are essentially changing industries, which means while there will be some basic skills that you will be able to translate from one career to the other, when it comes down to specific experience, you may be lacking some.

With a functional resume, you will be able to place the majority of the resume’s focus on how you are specifically aligned with the executive position you are going after. Even if your experience isn’t vast, you should have knowledge of managing others, calculating figures, managing a budget of sorts (especially if you moved up to department head) and even projecting outcomes. The more you take corporate terms and align them with your academic experience, the better your chances will be of proving that you are the right person for the position you want.

Make Your Accomplishment Statements Strong

In your resume, there will be opportunities to spell out your accomplishments. The accomplishments statement absolutely has to be strong--this is vital to your chances of getting the position. Of course, you could quickly and easily talk about minor responsibilities and the overall function of your job as a college professor, but this won't be nearly effective enough to land you an executive level position. So instead, this is the time to talk about what you’ve actually accomplished.

How do you get this done? Again, you want to provide a sense of continuity between your academic and prospective corporate career, so look for experiences that line up between the two. If you’ve been a board committee lead, this is a good time to not just say you led a committee, but say exactly what you accomplished on the committee (talk about the committee’s hardships, how you helped pull it through, how many people you led, what goals you had and how you fulfilled them). The idea is to dig down deep, and to find anything that you can that shows your superior qualifications for the executive position. As both a professor and an executive, you need to make your accomplishments shine, so there's no excuse for giving less than your best.

Probably one of the most difficult aspects of making the switch from one industry to another is being so settled in your current field that you have no clear perspective of how you can make a difference in a new industry. This is really the time to look at the professional side of yourself, though--with the right approach, professors can become very successful corporate executives.