Transferable skills are one of your most important assets when you’re considering new job opportunities. To connect these valuable skills with the range of potential opportunities, however, you’ll need to rethink the application of those skills and get comfortable “repurposing” them.
What Are Transferable Skills?
These are job capabilities that bring value to many environments, rather than being specific to a given organization. Although you may have learned and practiced them in the context of, say, volunteer work, they can be applied to new types of nonprofit work or to new for-profit job opportunities.
Some examples of transferable skills might include technology skills, an ability to work with customers/the public, management expertise, communication skills, or project management expertise, among many others.
The easiest way to explore repurposing your skills is to start reading job descriptions for industries or organizations that interest you. Check out the wording they use to describe various positions, and line up your skills against their specifications. Adapt their language to describe your capabilities. That way, potential employers who don’t understand what a Project Specialist Grade IV is capable of will still have a chance to understand the value you bring.
Reframing your skills is a process that asks you to identify and understand your skills in a broader context. In addition, you’ll need to do the following:
Reconsider the language you use to describe your skills. You want to describe what you can do in terms that make sense to your audience, which means you need to understand and describe in their language.
In order to translate your current transferable skills and experience into broader opportunities, it’s necessary to describe them in words and descriptive phrases that resonate with the people who might hire you. That means:
• using business terminology to describe non-business activities (for example, “created user-friendly, actionable training materials” instead of “wrote up notes for volunteer staff")
• focusing on the value and benefits you bring rather than the titles you’ve had (consider “led the development and launch of the first program to support adult learners in the community,” rather than “volunteer head of adult services for the public library”) ; and
• emphasizing outcomes and results rather than activities and roles (for example, “developed collaborative programs with several local nonprofits that resulted in a 20 percent increase in membership” rather than “ran outreach programs”).
Leadership, team building. Project management, budget and resource oversight. Vendor evaluation, contract negotiation and licensing, cost reductions. Taking initiative, leading collaborative projects, focusing on emerging opportunities. Phrasing skill descriptions in terms of results, accomplishments, and value added allows them to resonate with any employer.
Rethink and repurpose what you can do with your skills. What roles, responsibilities, and opportunities would your skills prepare you for if your current position didn’t exist?
For example, if you run the numbers for an organization but the role of “bookkeeper” didn’t exist, how else would you describe what your skills are? Think ability to organize and make sense of financial information, strong attention to detail, ability to extrapolate patterns from data and synthesize that information for strategic decision support.
Develop confidence in your skills – and your contribution. You probably have confidence in the work you’ve been doing, but now you’re going to take those competencies in a new direction. Because reframing your skills has as its goal, however, getting you into new opportunities, you’ll need confidence in both your job skills and your ability to navigate unknown space. So focus on your track record of successes and know you’ll be able to repeat them in new environments, even if it does require an initial learning curve.
It’s up to you to make sure your confidence factor is where it needs to be. This means understanding and celebrating the value of your knowledge. It means respecting your skills, and expecting that others should as well.
It means knowing that what you deliver adds value to projects, and organizations, and communities. It means that you express confidence and assurance in your conversations, and model a professional demeanor that calmly says “I understand that I am/will be an asset to any organization I work with.”
So get into the habit of acknowledging what you’re good at, with a focus on what your skills have accomplished. Don’t be shy about this; you do bring value, and it’s up to you to highlight it in language that’s meaningful to potential employers.
Still shy about this? Recruit a friendly colleague who understands what you do and will happily describe to you your greatest assets. And when you think about or describe those assets, understand that they contribute value to many types of organizations, both your current employer and other employers yet to come.
