By Paige Moult, Regional Consultant
Something that we often notice that is missed out on in resumes, is transferable skills. It’s the buzzword that is usually spoken about during our jobseeker’s registration interviews. They are the type of skills that are learned from all of a person’s work experience but are not specific to the roles you have had. With the current negative impacts of coronavirus on employment, now more than ever might be the time to identify your transferable skills. If you have been following our posts, you would have seen a recent post by Johanna Milbank, discussing the industries that have reduced their employment and those that have increased their recruitment during this time. As mentioned in the Forbes article ‘“Soft” Is An Understatement: The Importance of Transferable Skills’, it is your transferable skills that will help you to secure a role in a new industry.
Here are a few areas to focus on to find and communicate your Transferable skills:
Your attributes: By listing these skills about yourself in your resume it shows your prospective employer the type of person you are and the attributes that you will bring to the workplace. For example, team working skills: shows a employer how well you will work with your potential co-workers. Then by including a small example and emphasizing the experience you have with a skill can help to prove your point.
Putting your skills into context: Instead of focusing on technical and job specific aspects of your experience, try to focus on how the skills that can transfer across. For example, the skills used to pitch an idea to your supervisor within your workplace can also be used in part of the sales process when you are trying to pitch a product or service to a customer.
In the above example, you are using the following skills:
sales – trying to persuade the employer or another workmate to accept the idea or buy in to the product or service,
negotiation – on how you will help to implement an idea or the pricing or resourcing specific to the idea,
Communications – the communication skills used to portray your idea clearly or communicate the benefits of the product or service accurately.
These are all skills that can be relevant to many situations, but the most important part for you to understand, is how the skill you are focusing on will be used in other roles.
If you are struggling to discover your transferable skills, there are so many different examples of these listed on search engines, it is just a matter of finding the skills that resonate with you the most.
Seek.com has a good list of transferable skills to reference: https://www.seek.com.au/career-advice/article/transferable-skills-checklist
Try to start by thinking about the work experiences that you have had. Pick one role, and think about the duties you performed and the skills you needed to do that role. Pick the skills that you did the most and those that you were really good at. Try to relate these to how they could be used in a completely different industry or position. Sticking with the example used above, think about the interactions you have with people, whether they are staff or customers, when having discussions, do you persuade, or negotiate?
I have found it is easy to talk about transferable skills but the difficult part is identifying where or how these skills will be best utilised in a new position. This could be done by thinking about the type of transferable skills that will be most useful in the role you are applying for, and work backwards to try to understand if you already have these. If a task or skill requirement seems similar to something you have done before then it most likely uses transferable skills. You are just using those skills in a different context. What you need to work out is how to describe how you can use that skill, developed in one sector, to a potential employer in another sector.
As mentioned in the Forbes article ‘The 7 Transferable Skills To Help You Change Careers’, taking a deeper understanding of your transferable skills also can help to identify where you can make improvements. These areas of potential improvement can lead you to different learning opportunities, or simply a higher awareness of using these skills more frequently to develop them.
Whether you are changing jobs within the same industry, or moving into a new one, regardless of the circumstances, knowing and understanding your transferable skills will help your future employers to understand the strengths that you will bring to their workplace, how you might adapt to a new industry and it might even spark a journey of learning and developing what may have been a weakness into a strength.
Sources:
Webber, J 2019, ‘“Soft” Is An Understatement: The Importance of Transferable Skills’, Forbes, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2019/04/26/soft-is-an-understatement-the-importance-of-transferable-skills/#6699979c5ea9>.
Yate, M 2018, ‘The 7 Transferable Skills To Help You Change Careers’, Forbes, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2018/02/09/the-7-transferable-skills-to-help-you-change-careers/#1ca9b9654c04>.
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