Can I tell you something that took me way too long to figure out?
There’s a reason you keep applying to government roles you’re clearly qualified for
and hearing absolutely nothing back.
It’s not your experience.
It’s not your degree.
It’s not even your resume format.
It’s the language.
Government hiring managers aren’t reading your resume the way you wrote it.
They’re scanning for specific terminology: program compliance, data integrity,
policy implementation, stakeholder coordination.
Words that signal you understand how government work actually operates.
But if you came up in social work, case management, or nonprofit
nobody taught you to write that way.
You were taught to write for your supervisor. For your case notes. For your clients.
That language doesn’t translate automatically.
And when it doesn’t, your resume gets passed over for someone with less experience
who just happened to use the right words.
That’s the translation gap. And it’s fixable.
The Helper’s Skill Translation Cheat Sheet is a direct framework for closing it. Take what you’ve been doing and swap it for the language
government hiring managers are actually scanning for.
With clarity,
Kourtney