We’ve all heard of transferable skills by now. But what are they? How do you identify YOUR transferable skills? And once you’ve identified them, how do you describe them in ways an employer in a different field or company can grasp?
Put simply, transferable skills are skills that can be applied in different situations or environments. We all have them, but sometimes they can be hard to identify and describe.
Before getting into how to identify and talk about yours, let’s take a look at some classic examples of transferable skills and why they’re important.
Teaching
Critical Thinking
Problem Solving
Coordinating
Relationship Building
Teamwork
Listening
Customer Service
Planning
Flexibility
Flexibility
Evaluating
Management
Organization
Public Speaking
Mentoring
As you can see from the table above, there’s lots of transferable skills, and you probably have a decent amount of these.
Let’s pause right quick. You might notice that these are generally what we’d also call “Soft Skills.” Soft skills are mostly interpersonal, while hard/technical skills are mostly industry or job specific.
Part of why soft skills are so valued by employers is because they’re relatively difficult to teach. How many week(s) long trainings have you sat through at work where communication or collaboration was a big topic? And how many communication- or collaboration-related problems did you encounter at work after said training? Exactly.
Highlighting your transferable skills well will make you a much more attractive candidate because hiring managers know the value of soft skills: they’re absolutely necessary for success in the workplace.
So let’s take a look at how you can practice identifying and describing your transferable skills.
DE-CENTER THE CONTEXT
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One of the more frequent conversation topics I have with people is career pivoting. Moving from one career field or industry to another.
If you’ve ever thought about switching careers, you’re not unlike a lot of people. According to Apollo Technical, 32% of workers between the ages of 25-44 considered changing careers in the last year. That’s a pretty big number.
And while lots of people consider changing careers, many find the challenge of doing so intimidating.
Pivoting from one career to another can be difficult. Sure, there are those overnight success stories, but those are few and far between. The much more common reality is that it’s going to take you time, effort, planning, and resources.
And that’s ok, because you CAN get the job done! People of all ages can and do pivot careers every year. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to successfully change your career.
COMMIT TO IT
First of all, no, it is not too late for you to change your career. You are not too old. You did not wait too long. Yes, you are smart enough. Yes, you can do what it takes.
You just have to commit to it. Changing careers is no small task. You need to decide that this is happening. A lack of commitment to the process and goal will likely draw out the search longer than what it probably needs to be.
Don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give 100% of your energy and time to your pivot. Even if you can only manage 20%, GIVE 20% and be consistent. The idea is to put consistent action into the goal of changing careers. Making it real will help you find more success.
SELF-ASSESSMENT
The real work begins once you’ve committed to the idea that you’re going to change your career. First step: a thorough self-assessment.
The first part of your self-assessment is your goals. What do you hope to accomplish with this pivot? Professionally AND personally. What’s on your list that this pivot will allow you to cross off? Map out your goals. Think short-term, long-term, lifestyle, and ultimate.
The next part is your values. What are the principles that you want to be surrounded by once you’ve successfully pivoted? What type of environment do you want to work in? What do you value in your personal and professional life that this career change will help you achieve or maintain? This is sorta your “Why” behind it all.
And finally, your skills. This tends to be the part lots of people struggle with the most, so let’s break it down some.
I know what I wanna do…
If you already know what you want to switch to, cool. Do you already have the necessary skill set for those roles? And if so, do those skills energize you? If the answer to those questions is yes, let’s go! You’re in a great spot and you may be ready to start applying already.
If you don’t have the necessary skills yet, that’s ok, but you may need to do some skill building to make yourself a viable candidate. There’s nothing wrong with that! Do some research into options that work best for you. Talk to people who have made similar career shifts about how they built the necessary skills.
If you do already have the skills necessary for your desired role, but those skills don’t energize you, you might want to briefly re-evaluate why you want to go into that type of role. Even if you’re good at something, your risk for burning out early goes up if you don’t enjoy doing it.
I don’t know what I wanna do…
If you don’t yet know what type of job or field you want to switch to, ok, let’s start with the basics. What are your top skills? Which of those skills energize you the most? Use those skills as your guide! In what field/roles can you use those skills the most? Some job search engines allow you to search for jobs by skill. Utilize those to help you identify jobs that might align with your skills and interests.
Notice I said things that energize you. Not things you’re passionate about. That’s because “passion” in a work sense can be elusive. Lots of people aren’t really sure about what their passion is, but identifying skills that they get energy from (think: flow state) is a much more reachable task.
YOU NEED A PLAN
Many of us are not particularly organized, especially when it comes to a job search. Building an action plan around your career change goal will not only help organize you, it will also help you use your energy more strategically. Come up with a plan that outlines what you need to know, what you need to do, and who you need to talk to. And give yourself deadlines for each task.
YOUR NETWORK
Build your network! Use LinkedIn, tap into your friendships, go to networking events. Try to meet people who are currently doing the work you want to do. Your goal doesn’t have to be “hopefully this person gets me a job” every time you network. Just learning helpful information from them can be powerful. You want to expand your network to include people who can help you learn. And remember, be respectful in your outreach. Everyone is busy with their own priorities, so be mindful of their time if and when you ask something of them.
WRAPPING UP
Changing careers is hard. But it’s definitely possible, and people do it every year. Commit yourself to the process and goal, conduct a thorough self-assessment, build yourself a strategic plan, and expand your network. One day in the future, you’ll look up and find yourself with a whole new job title in a whole new field.
Next Issue on April 13th: Identify Your Transferable Skills
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Do you ever wonder what hiring managers are looking for in their candidates?
The specifics of what a hiring manager needs for a particular job will vary depending on the job, the company, and potentially a variety of other considerations, of course, but there tends to be a pretty consistent 5 themes.
These 5 themes make up the 5 Major Screening Factors. Master these screening factors, and you’ll position yourself as a frontrunner in your job search.
SCREENING FACTOR #1: PERSONALITY
That’s right. When it comes down to it, and all the remaining candidates are technically qualified for the role, the deciding factor is often personality.
Do they like you?
Do they feel like you’d work well with the other employees?
Does your communication style vibe with theirs?
Would your energy level work well for this role?
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“What about the heading and address and all that stuff? What do I do about all that?”
“Should I write a general cover letter, or a specific one for each job?”
Let’s talk about cover letter writing. And guess what! Cover letters (in my opinion) are actually pretty easy. Especially compared to resumes.
FIRST THING’S FIRST…
Cover letters are easy because they’re short. Really short. The whole thing, including the heading, the addressing, and content, should be 1 page. That means your actual content should be around half a page–4 paragraphs, 14-17 sentences.
You can do that.
If your cover letter is longer than 1 page, it’s probably too long. Kinda like resumes, nobody likes reading cover letters. Hirers read them mostly out of necessity, so don’t give them a whole essay. It’s overwhelming. Give them the highlights in 1 page, single spaced, and standard font size/type.
YOUR HEADING AND ADDRESSING
Your cover letter heading should be the same as your resume heading:
Name nice and big, with your contact information and maybe your LinkedIn profile (if you have one and it’s ready to go) below it. The consistency will help you stick in the minds of your readers.
Then comes the addressing. Personally, I think this part is just a relic of a time when people would actually mail in application materials. It’s not the most important thing in your cover letter, but it’s nice to include it correctly since it’s still convention. Here’s what you should include:
Date
Hiring Manager’s Name
Hiring Manager’s Title
Company Name
Company Address Line 1
Company Address Line 2
Followed by: “Dear [Hiring Manager’s Name],”
Here’s the thing. It’s often kinda hard to find the name and title of the hiring manager because it’s not always listed anywhere. If you can’t find it, just leave it out of the address part and instead start your letter with “Dear Hiring Committee/Manager.”
Pretty easy, right? Stick with me!
LETTER CONTENT: INTRO
This is the part where people’s struggles begin, but there’s a strategy and organization to writing a good letter. Again, I recommend 4 paragraphs, starting with an intro.
Your introduction paragraph should be just that: An introduction. Introduce yourself, how you found out about the job posting, what you’re excited about, and what the reader will discover about you as they continue to review your candidacy.
You want to do this in a way that is unique to you. For example, you’re not just a talent acquisition professional, maybe you’re a bilingual talent acquisition professional with a passion for building reliable relationships that produce mutually beneficial outcomes. The opportunity to hone in on the details of the company’s acquisition process excites you, and you’re confident that you can leverage those details to attract and hire top tier talent.
Think of it like this: Imagine that the candidate pool is 100 people. You want to write an intro that maybe 15 other candidates could write. That’s how you stand out from the crowd. 3-4 sentences.
LETTER CONTENT: PARAGRAPH 1
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Are you skilled at anything? What are your strengths? Quick, tell me what they are!
Ok you can relax now. Breathe.
I was talking with a friend who was looking to change his career path recently when he said, “I don’t have any skills.” Now mind you, this is somebody with a whole PhD and years of experience. And somehow, this person was convinced that they had zero skills. I was thinking, “What are you even talking about?! Is that a joke???”
But this person was being serious.
Here’s the thing: Everyone has skills. Having skills isn’t necessarily special. What is special and sometimes challenging is knowing what they are and how to talk about them. You have them, you just might not know how to talk about them, which may make you think you don’t have them.
Here’s something I do with my 1-on-1 clients who struggle with identifying their skills:
“Tell me TEN strengths and/or skills you have. TEN. Right now. Go.”
It’s at this very moment the look of panic sets in. Almost every time. Ten is a lot, especially when being asked to name them on the spot. But guess what. They always manage to give me ten things they’re skilled at. Sometimes it takes them 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes they’re worded clumsily. Sometimes they’re basic. But they always complete the task. Trust me, you have at least that many too.
DEVELOPING YOUR LANGUAGE
If you feel like you have a hard time identifying what your skills are–what you’re actually good at–you’re not alone.
Many people have a hard time with that.
And while there are plenty of online assessments you can take to help you figure those things out, what I’ve found to be maybe just as important is developing your own language around how you describe your skills. Tell me in your own words what you’re good at.
It’s one thing to take a StrengthsFinder or MBTI assessment and regurgitate what pops out of it, it’s another thing to be able to talk about your strengths and skills in a way that’s natural to you and based on your own life experiences. That takes practice. But it’s valuable because people in the professional world want to know who YOU are. The real you. Not some curated profile.
When you can talk about your skills in a way that’s natural to you, you come off as more authentic. Don’t you like authentic? I like authentic. You know who else likes authentic people? Hiring managers. It sucks to hire somebody only to realize after the fact that they’re a totally different person–skills and all–on day one of the job.
SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF AN EMPLOYER
You gotta be able to talk about them in your own language (meaning naturally and authentically), but for the job searchers among us, you also have to be able to talk about skills in the language of your would-be employer.
You need to be able to embed their language in your examples in an interview, your highlights in a cover letter, when you’re networking with them, etc. We’ll get into transferable skills in a future issue, but this is essential in making your skills transferable.
BACK TO IDENTIFYING
Give yourself 10 minutes to identify 10 skills and write them down. Even if they’re clumsily worded. Once you have them all down, write them down again, but less clumsily and more concise. Do that as many times as you need to until you have something that feels good and real. This is how you start to develop your language!
But wait, there’s more.
Ask yourself this: What would my co-workers and friends say I’m good at? Sometimes, the people around you can identify your skills better than you can. Think from their perspective. What skills would the people you work with every day ascribe to you? Ask some of the people you trust about it. See what they have to say.
STORYTELLING AND PROFICIENCY
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THE GRAVY, ISSUE 1
Resumes.
Or should I say…résumés. It’s French, ya know.
They’ve become the go-to tool hiring managers use to initially assess candidates nowadays. They also strike fear in the hearts of applicants (and hiring managers, but that’s another story) all over the world. Still, if you wanna get that next job and move on in your career journey, you gotta write a good resume. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s dive in.
THE GOOD NEWS
Writing a good resume is not as hard as you might think.
You just have to learn how to do it the right way. And guess what! You can learn that! Include the right sections. Keep your writing concise. Communicate value. Don’t distract your reader. Before you know it you’ll have a strong resume.
THE NEWS THAT KINDA SUCKS
You have to tailor your resume for each job.
Yup. That means you have to retouch your resume every time you apply for a job. Dang. It’s tedious work, but it’s well worth it. The reason is because hiring managers want to see information that’s relevant to their posting. They don’t care about everything you’ve done, just the relevant stuff. So ya see, tailoring your resume will yield you better results on your apps.
Let’s examine the how-to of good resume writing:
TAILORING YOUR RESUME
Why this is important:
Along with hiring managers wanting to see what’s relevant to them, there’s potentially another reason why you need to tailor your resume: the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). An ATS is basically a piece of software that stores application materials. Some of them can be used to help hiring managers scan for relevant qualifications. Make it easy for whoever–or whatever–is scanning your resume to see that you have relevant skills and experiences!
How to tailor correctly:
Dap up your best friend and thank them for the good times, because the job description is your new best friend. Read it thoroughly and identify the key words in it (i.e. what words or phrases are repeated? What essential skills and experiences can you pull out? What are the first few “asks” in each section?). Once you’ve identified the key words, USE THEM. Use the job description’s language in your resume. This is part of what the ATS is looking for.
Reorder your bullet points so that the more relevant ones come first within each job experience.
Scan that thang like a consultant, not a job seeker. That means read it to identify the problem(s) that needs solving. Address the company’s needs through your bullet points in your experience section(s).
Really though…how long does it take?
A RESUME SHOULD BE SIMPLE
When you look at your resume, is it distracting? Got a lot of extras like colors and photos and shapes and stuff? Take those things out (unless you’re a designer or artist). They’re distracting.
Use a basic format, but avoid downloaded templates. ATS’s don’t always read those well.
Generally speaking, your resume should be pretty short. Unless you’re an executive-level candidate with loads of experience, try to keep it to 1 full page. No one likes reading long resumes. Or resumes at all.
SECTIONS
There’s a lot of sections you could have on your resume. Some of the common ones include:
Header
Education
Experience
Volunteer Experience
Skills
Research
Language
In general, the most important ones are Experience, Education, and your header, which includes your name and contact information. I’d throw Skills in there too, especially if you work in a more technical field or have a lot of technical skills to highlight.
*Pro-tip*: A Skills section is for hard/technical skills, not soft skills. Things like communication, leadership, patience, teamwork, etc. should show up in your Experience section via your bullet points, NOT the Skills section.
Got a question yet? Submit it and I’ll answer selected ones in the next issue! Otherwise, read on…
C = Challenge. What was the challenge you took on or needed to overcome?
P = Process. How did you overcome the challenge? What skills did you use?
R = Result. What was the outcome of your actions? If you got a number or percentage to include, please do!
I should be able to pull out each of these elements from your bullet points! Here’s an example of a bullet point that I can’t pull those things out of:
Helped student organization raise funds
I can see the challenge: raising funds for a student organization. I don’t know how you did that or what the result was, though. Here’s one that’s much better:
Outreached via email to 12 potential sponsors for student networking event, resulting in $2,000 raised to cover costs
See what I’m sayin’? I can see the challenge, the process (email outreach), and the result ($2000). The result helps me understand your proficiency with the skills you communicated in the bullet point, so definitely include the result.
Again, it’s not particularly hard once you get the hang of it. Just takes practice.
Community Bin
I went ahead and sourced some questions from the community regarding resumes. Let’s take a look and do some Q & A:
Q: I regularly update my resume (like every few months) so I can stay ready to apply, but I don’t always tailor my resume for each specific job I apply for. Should I change my approach?
A: It’s good that you regularly update your resume because it allows you to update it while your experiences are still fresh. Still, you definitely should be tailoring your resume for each job. I recommend keeping a master copy (one that houses all your experiences) that you update sorta regularly, and then making tailored/shortened versions specifically for each job you apply for.
Q: Do I need a professional summary on my resume?
A: In many-to-most cases, I’d say no, you don’t need one. If you’re a particularly seasoned professional with a really dope specialty or loads of experience you want to tie together, then go for it. But it’s gotta add value. Generally, I’d say save the space.
Next Issue on January 19th: Identifying Your Skills
The next issue of The Gravy will be released on January 19th! We’ll take a look at something I’ve seen a lot of people struggle with: Identifying Your Skills. It’s good gravy.
If y’all have any questions related to identifying your skills, submit them below and I’ll address selected ones next time.
The Gravy is Be Gallant Coaching’s bi-weekly newsletter focusing on career development topics that are relevant to the every-day professional. Subscribe today to get access to future issues.
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