Transferable Skill Sets

When you understand your transferable skill sets, you can open up a whole new realm of job options and career possibilities for yourself.

Transferable skills are skills that you develop at work, school, through hobbies, volunteer work or every day life experience. They are not specific to one specific job, so you can apply them to a variety of different jobs. Plenty of skills are transferable. To decide whether a skill is transferable, ask yourself if you could use that skill in different types of jobs. If the answer is yes, then the skill is transferable.

Expand Your Career Options

In today's labor market, it is less common for people to follow a straight career path. Often people move into a variety of different roles through their lives, and that means that understanding the skills that you can transfer to a new field of work can give a big boost to your career.

Discover Your Skills

To determine the skills that you could transfer to a new career, you really just need to do some good, old fashioned brainstorming. Think of your skills as either hard skills or soft skills. Hard skills are the things that you have learned and soft skills have more to do with your personality. If you would use the phrase "I can" when describing the skill, it's probably a hard skill (i.e. I can create a bar graph sing Microsoft Excel), and if you would use the phrase "I am" it is probably a soft skill (i.e. I am a detail oriented).

Skills can also be divided into skill types. Most often skill sets are divided into data (working with information), people, and things (working with machinery or tools). Try thinking through all of your hard skills related to data, then your hard skills related to people, and finally brainstorm your hard skills related to things (see below for examples). Once you have finished brainstorming your hard skills, do the same for your soft skills. Brainstorm your soft skills related to data, your soft skills related to people, and your soft skills related to things and you should have a pretty thorough list of your skills.

Using these categories for brainstorming your transferable skill sets can help you to remember the wide variety of skills that you have used and ensure you don't forget about major skill sets.

The chart below gives you examples of each type of skill. You can easily create a similar chart for yourself to help with your own brainstorming.

As you brainstorm your transferable skill sets, don't worry if you have many skills in one area and fewer in another. That is quite common because people often have different preferences or aptitudes for working with either data, people or things.

What Do I do With My List of Skills?

Once you have a thorough list of your skills, you can use you new self knowledge to:

Determine new career options
Look at your list of skills with an open mind. Are there are new career options that you'd like to pursue? How do your transferable skills fit with the requirements of those jobs? You may be surprised at the number of different career options that are a good fit with your current skills.
Find new job leads
Forget about job titles when you look at job leads. Look at the skills employers require to determine whether you are qualified to apply to different jobs.
Market Yourself
Comments about your relevant skills can make a great addition on your resumes and cover letters and in job interviews. Your transferable skill sets can open up amazing new opportunities for you.