When venturing on a career change into a new industry, it’s natural to wonder if your past experiences are relevant or if your skill set aligns with the job requirements.
However, the reality often surprises many. Enter: transferable skills.
Whatever your background or previous experience, you’ve developed valuable skills that can play a vital role in forging your new career path. These versatile abilities not only distinguish you from other applicants but also showcase the unique value you bring to the table.
In this blog, we’ll explore the concept of transferable skills, highlighting their significance for career changers, and offering insights on how to effectively leverage them in your job search.
Excited to learn more? Let’s jump right in!
Transferable skills are the skills you’ve cultivated from your past experiences that can be applied to the role or industry you’re aim to transition into.
These skills aren’t confined solely from a previous career path; they can also stem from volunteer work, hobbies, courses, or even daily routines at home.
Transferable skills span from hard skills to soft skills.
Hard skills are specific, trainable abilities that can be defined and measured. Examples range from fluency in a foreign language, typing speed, or operating machinery. These skills are often acquired through formal education and training.
Conversely, soft skills are personal attributes and interpersonal skills that affect one’s ability to work and interact with other. They are less tangible and harder to quantify. Soft skills include abilities like effective communication, problem-solving, and adaptability.
Many career changers worry about not having enough experience to bring to their new career path – especially when it comes to competing with more experienced professionals for the same roles. This is where transferable skills step in helping you land your first job in your new industry.
Taking a moment to introspect on the array of skills you’ve amassed over time – both practical and interpersonal – can be remarkably enlightening. In numerous sectors, soft skills hold equal weight to hard skills. These transferable competencies distinguish candidates as great team players, or even potential managers.
While qualifications are undoubtedly important, the ability to effectively collaborate with teammates is often deemed just as critical. After all, if an employee doesn’t have the interpersonal skills to work effectively with other team members, it can be more of a challenge to get hired. So, never underestimate the power of both skillsets!
Thus far, we’ve explored what transferable skills actually are, and why they’re so important. Now, you might be pondering which skills potential employees look out for and which ones you might already have.
Let’s take a look at 5 examples of highly sought-after transferable skills:
Interpersonal skills are the skills that make you a great team player – such as being a great communicator. Simply put, interpersonal skills are the skills you have in how you communicate and interact with other people, often known as soft skills or people skills.
When hiring, employers consider how you’ll work collaboratively with the existing team. Having traits like active listening, empathy, and the ability to offer and receive feedback are particularly sought after.
Some of the other top interpersonal skills include the ability to show empathy, being able to motivate others, active listening, and sharing feedback across different levels and communication styles.
These interpersonal skills went a long way in helping you transform your career in a matter of months.
Problem-solving is a highly desirable skill, especially in the tech industry.
You might have to quickly fix a bug in real-time or work collaboratively with your team to overcome a website’s usability issues. Being able to identify the root of a problem and propose tangible solutions is an invaluable skill – so if you’ve done a lot of problem-solving in the past, be sure to make it known!
Highlighting this skill on your resume demonstrates your ability to identify and then effectively solve an issue, which is incredibly useful and highly valued across different roles and industries. It also shows that you are solution-orientated, and no matter what role you’re working in, challenges will arise which need solving.
While you may not have held a formal “project manager” job title, but if you excel at multitasking, time management, and orchestrating stakeholder interactions, you can definitely list “project management skills” on your resume.
Project management skills are particularly useful in client-facing positions (e.g., freelancing or agency work).
This skillset is so important as demonstrates your ability to plan, prioritise and structure time in an efficient and effective manner. And when you’re looking for top transferable skills to highlight, this one is always in high demand, especially when working in positions with different stakeholders and in roles that require a degree of multitasking.
If you’re changing careers of applying for entry-level positions, you might struggle to highlight any distinguishable experience as a leader. But leadership skills don’t necessarily confine to managerial roles.
Leading on specific projects and initiatives, delegating tasks to colleagues, or volunteering to take on more responsibility – all are examples of valuable leadership skills that you can bring into your new career.
Having leadership experience is a transferable skill that companies are looking for, irrespective if it’s from a different industry and you’re in the process of a career change. Top leadership skills include strategising, steering a team, motivating others, prioritising and building trust.
Public speaking is a rare skill and one that goes a long way in almost every sector. You might find yourself having to present your work to the company, lead team strategy workshops, or even speak at events. Being a strong public speaker is considered a desirable quality for senior leaders, so any experience in confidently speaking in front of groups is bound to make your resume stand out.
As can be seen, transferable skills are an important part of career change as they showcase what you already bring to the table, in addition to your newly acquired skills.
So, there we have it. Everything you need to know about transferable skills.
When navigating on a career change, you might feel like being a newcomer to the field puts you at a disadvantage in the job market. Hopefully, this has illustrated how your past experience can be a help – as opposed to a hindrance – on your career change journey.
Your previous experience, and what you learned from it, are part of your unique personal brand. Remember: employers don’t just hire robots who perform the job’s basic tasks and nothing more. They hire humans, and the skills, backgrounds, and perspectives those humans bring to the table.