Transferable Skills (3min read)
Transferable Skills can give you the opportunity to take your career path in a different direction. Unpicking the skills you have acquired from your previous experience and demonstrating that they can be transferred to a different role is something we specialise in. To market yourself better consider these few pointers:
What are transferable skills?
Essentially, they are skills or abilities that can be relevant for a wide range of roles or sectors. You’ll usually gather these throughout previous employment, voluntary roles, work experience, hobbies or even from home.
Why are transferable skills important?
They’re not as solid as skills directly relevant to a vacancy but transferable skills are still sought after by employers. They show how you’ll fit into a team, what other things you can bring to the job and how much you’ve learnt from other roles, education or interests.
If you think you lack experience in your chosen industry, take a look at other areas of your life and what skills you may have acquired. These will be particularly helpful for showcasing your potential if you’re applying for entry-level roles, or if you’re thinking of changing career paths.
Here’s just a few examples of transferable skills, but if you look hard enough you’ll find many more from your experiences.
LISTENING
This is such an obvious skill that most people have, the trick with this one is showing tangible examples on your CV. Whether you work in retail, have only just left school or have been in your career for some years already, you’re bound to have examples of times when you’re listening skills has led to something positive.
This includes meeting the brief exactly on a client’s project, ensuring customers are given exactly what they’ve ordered (especially if it’s a custom request) or you’ve been a consistently quick learner in university or the workplace.
What transferable skills should I include in my CV?
The job description is a good place to start when considering which skills you need to include. These job specifications will usually state clearly what is required for a role, and from there you can deduce the soft skills vs the hard skills.
Consider the top points and what may be relevant to the role you are applying for and how you’ve shown these skills in your previous work, hobbies or education. It’s important to back up any skills you include with examples or achievements attained from using them. Always, be clear about how these can benefit your new employer and the company.
How do I demonstrate them on my CV?
As mentioned above, it’s great to have a whole list of relevant transferable skills you showcase, the key is to be able to evidence each one with a real-life example. An employer won’t be drawn to your CV if you just say you’re a good leader, they want to see that you’re a good leader.
For each skill you choose to include have a strong example that you can list and confidently talk about should you be asked at a later stage. Consider rewording, like so:
Don’t: “I am good at a communicating.”
Do: “My communication skills led to a successful resolution when the particular item a customer wanted wasn’t available and I convinced them of another products suitability.”
The important thing is to not lie; employers and recruiters will be able to see through this as soon as they start asking you questions at interview.
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