Considering a new role or a career change to a completely different industry or new field? You will have a variety of skills that you can transfer and bring with you to your new job – these are transferable skills. Transferable skills are knowledge and abilities that are not specific to a particular job, but they are useful for many different jobs. These transferable skills can be hard skills or soft skills and can help you succeed in a career change or new job.
Hard skills are technical skills with most of these skills being specific to a certain job or task. These are skills that you have developed from a qualification or on-the-job training. You can transfer some of these skills from one job to another. For example, your ability to use Point-of-Sale (POS) equipment and common word processing software.
An employer can easily see what technical or hard skills you have from your qualifications, licences, or on-the-job training in your current industry if you list these and other technical skills on your resume or curriculum vitae (CV). However, an employer may not know any other abilities you could have. These other abilities are your soft skills, which could make you an ideal employee, so it’s important to remember to highlight these in your job applications too.
Soft skills are the personal qualities that we have that can help us thrive and are important skills in a workplace. We all have soft skills; these skills are all transferable. These might include organisational, communication, teamwork, time management, and people skills.
You need to be able to identify what transferable skills you have and link these to the skills that are needed in the new job or target industry you are interested in. If these transferable skills are soft skills, then make sure you include these on your resume and discuss them in an interview.
Here are our four steps to help you identify and highlight your skills to a potential employer:
Step 1: Identify your existing skills
To identify your skill set and what transferable skills you have, you need to consider all aspects of your life. What skills have you gained from your current role, previous experience, voluntary work, school, social clubs, playing sport, and your personal life?
Brainstorm and write down all the tasks and responsibilities you’ve had. If you can’t remember, then look at past job descriptions or ask your friends, colleagues, or family. For each of these tasks and responsibilities, list all the different skills that you needed to complete the task or succeed in your role. You may identify some technical skills and a number of soft skills such as time management, problem solving, great communication, and leadership skills.
The following questions can help you start to identify your existing skills:
- Have you written reports at work or articles, blog posts, or newsletters for social clubs? These could be used to display your amazing written communication skills.
- Have you played team sports, or worked with a team to achieve a common goal? You could include these to show how you work well with the other team players and have effective teamwork skills.
- Can you identify situations when you have needed to remain calm when dealing with upset people? This is a great skill to show when you want to highlight your people skills when looking for roles such as a customer service representative.
- Have you used specific software, POS equipment, or project management tools? These are technical or hard skills, but you could also have the ability to learn new technology, software, or digital tools quickly. The ability to learn and make good use of new technology is a great soft skill to have.
Step 2: Identify the skills required in your new career
In this step you will need to do research. Begin by reading the job description for the roles that you are interested in – the employer may list the transferable skills they are looking for here.
If they don’t specify the transferable skills they are looking for, then ask around. Find out what transferable skills are valued in the different roles in the industry you are interested in. To do this, you will need to start to build your network, find people who are working in the industry, and talk to potential employers. This process of networking can also help you with your job search and achieve your new career move.
Step 3: Link your skills
Next, you need to make the connection between the skills you have and the skills in the job or career you want. You may be able to make some direct matches. For example, if the employer is looking for someone with great time management skills and you have identified this as one of your skills, that is great, tick it off.
At this stage you might discover that you don’t have all the skills required. Don’t give up. Many soft skills don’t neatly fit under one category. You might need to rethink and bend them a little bit to fit what the employer is looking for.
For example, if you have identified that you have learned how to use new tools or technology to do a task, this also means that you may have had to change the way you have done things in the past. If an employer is looking for someone who is adaptable and flexible, then this example can be used to highlight both your digital skills and adaptability skills. When you start to link your skills, you will find that many of your soft skills are interchangeable.
Step 4: Highlight your skills
The final step is to make sure that potential employers know what transferable skills you have, including both your technical/hard skills and your soft skills. To highlight these, you could consider creating a functional resume, which places the emphasis on your skills rather than on your past roles or industry expertise. A functional resume is great for people who are just starting out in their career or who are looking for a career change.
Once you have included your transferable skills in your resume, make sure you discuss them in your cover letter as well. This ensures that whatever part of your job application the hiring manager looks at first, they will be able to know what transferable skills you can bring to the job.
Through this process, you may also find that you need to build on your existing skills and develop new skills for the career or new position you’re interested in.
