How to Mine for and Showcase Transferable Skills

When you’re looking to find a new job opportunity - either within your current company or somewhere new - it’s extremely helpful to spend some time taking a proper inventory of your transferable skills.

Transferable skills are the skills that you’ve picked up over the years, through your previous jobs, volunteer work, hobbies, family activities - anything that results in you gaining a new skill. These are not only important when searching for a new opportunity or entering the job market for the first time, but research now supports that highlighting them is essential to having a leg up later in your career.

There are a few things you can do to mine for transferable skills - I call it doing a “Skills Audit” - but one of the easiest ways is to do it is by grabbing a fresh sheet of paper or Google Doc, and creating 3 sections:

1. Title your first section “Experience”. Jot down any roles you have held (including full-time, internship, or part-time), hobbies you have enjoyed, training or certifications you have received, or other experiences, interests, and activities with friends and family that could be relevant.
2. Beneath that, create a new section called “Professional Goals” and list several occupations or educational options that interest you.
3. The final section is called “Transferable Skills.” For each item on your Experience list, try to do some mining - Which skills and duties were part of that role?  For help, you can use a Skills Checklist like this one or this one.  This is not the time to be humble - really hone in on the things that you’ve done!  Underline or add a check mark to skills that are necessary for success in both your past experiences AND your desired professional goals.

You can also group your transferable skills into buckets, such as Technology, Decision-Making, Organization, Learning, Communication, Research, and similar.

Once you’ve gotten these skills down, we need to make them pop by highlighting them on your resume.  A few quick tips to help with this:

• Highlight the right skills for the position of interest. When you identify a position of interest, you can use a free tool like O*Net to look up the type of position and get a breakdown of the most commonly requested transferable skills. Compare it to the list of transferable skills you already have, and if you have at least 50% of those required, be sure to highlight those in your resume.
• Always use measurable accomplishments where possible. In other words: Show, don’t tell. You want your transferable skills to be noteworthy, so it’s important to tie them to accomplishments so that they don’t ring hollow. A great way to do this is using the CAR Technique - Challenge, Action, Result.
• Consider resume format. If a chronological resume isn’t highlighting your skills powerfully, consider using a Skills-Based Resume instead.

In 2020, technical skills do matter, but there are many “soft skills” that can help swing the pendulum in your favor and help you land your next opportunity.