How to Identify your Transferable Job Skills

Skills and experience are two major factors that can help decide whether or not you’re a successful job applicant. So if you’re planning on changing career, you’ll need to be able to articulate and demonstrate your particular skill set. But before you start applying for jobs, you should make sure that you have all the right skills to actually undertake your career change.

This is where your Transferable Skills come into play. You should be able to recognise the pertinent skills that you have acquired throughout your life, and apply them to your new job or new career. They’ll feature on your CV and application forms and be discussed in Your Interviews. This article takes a look at how you can identify your transferable skills to aid your career change prospects.

Understanding the Term

The phrase transferable skill is pretty self-explanatory – it basically refers to a skill that you have acquired from your personal or working life that can be appropriated for a new job or career.

Transferable skills encompass technical skills (for instance skills pertaining to IT software applications, computer programming or web development), personal skills (communication ability, working with others and individually), as well as data skills (research, organisation with data and bookkeeping, statistics and ability to analyse).

Obviously, there are general transferable skills that can be applied to a multitude of new careers. These can include organisational and project management skills, administration skills, ability to supervise and manage, as well as good IT skills. This is often where your ability to articulate examples of your skills in practice, as well as how they would prove beneficial to your new job role, is important and can help to further your chances of landing a new job.

Identifying Your Transferable Skills

To get you started, it helps if you have an idea of the type of job you’re looking for in your new career change. Once you have an idea, take a look at your old job specifications, tasks and responsibilities and compare it to career profiles and job specifications of your new career. Are there any attributes that you can match up and transfer from one job role to another?

Don’t be afraid to take skills from your personal life (for instance, multi-tasking by running a home and working part-time) in addition to your working life, as they can all be relevant. Also take stock of your daily activities at work and try to allot them under the technical, data or personal transferable skills heading.

It’s very important that you can demonstrate that you understand your potential new employer’s needs, and that you are easily able to identify how you can fill them. Don’t forget to back up your skills with evidence of how you implemented these transferable skills in your old job, and how they would be pertinent to your new job. Experience counts for an awful lot!

Finally, you should always make sure that you keep your CV updated to ensure that you are always documenting any new skills you’ve acquired. Make sure that your transferable skills have prominence on your CV, and give brief but clear (don’t waffle!) examples of where you used them in your employment. This will hopefully help to create an attention-grabbing CV and job application, helping your chances of succeeding in your career change.

Updating Your CV

Knowing what to include on your CV can be tricky, especially if it has been a while since you last updated it. For help composing your CV, read our article How To Write A Good CV.