Continuing professional development

Elle se reconvertit dans le soin says that a woman has left one trade and taken up another, and no English reader arrives there from « reconvert ». Our verb is transitive and mechanical: a barn is reconverted into a house, a plant is reconverted to civilian work, and in every case something is turned back towards a state it held before. The French verb on this page is pronominal, se reconvertir, and the pronoun does the work — the subject is a person, the direction is forward, and what changes is what she does for a living. La reconversion is the noun for that, and it is the ordinary word in a job advertisement, standing beside le changement de métier on this list. Two consequences are worth having. Drop the pronoun and the subject stops being human: reconvertir une friche industrielle is about land, and nobody has changed career. And when you go the other way, reach for « retraining »: English « reconversion » belongs to factories and buildings, so used of a person it reads as a slip rather than as a new career.