To break into a new business sector, land a higher-level position, or change careers entirely, you need to demonstrate relevant skills on your resume. But the Catch-22 is, you can’t develop these without getting your foot to the door first. Or so you think.
The truth is: Even if you are planning for a clean start in a completely new role, you won’t be starting from ground zero. Why?
Because you have transferable skills.
What Are Transferable Skills?
Transferable skills are abilities and competencies you can apply across different work contexts, like communication, problem-solving, or time management.
For example, if you used to be a retail associate, you likely have strong interpersonal skills like rapport building, persuasion, or active listening. To boot, you probably have some solid organizational creds like being good with personal time management or misc administrative work.
These skills are easily transferable to other roles like an administrative assistant or a project coordinator because you’d be doing similar tasks but in a different context.
Moreover, you’ve probably acquired some transferable skills outside of the workplace. For example, while volunteering, working side jobs, interning, doing extra-curriculums, or mentoring others.
And you can (and should!) contextualize these competencies when writing your resume.
Transferable Skills Examples
Transferable skills include both hard and soft skills.
Transferable hard skills are functional and technical skills that you’ve acquired over the years, across different roles and projects. For example, your foreign language skills or experience with CRM software can be valuable to different types of employers.
More examples:
- Data analysis
- Project management
- Event organization
- Financial modeling
- Sales and negotiation
- Digital literacy
- Video editing
- Administrative support
Transferable soft skills stand for a sum of your character traits and interpersonal skills. Some soft skills examples in this category include strong public speaking skills, conflict management, mediation, and strong leadership abilities among others.
More examples:
- Emotional intelligence
- Adaptability
- Stress management
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- Customer service
- Collaboration
- Time management
To give you more context, let’s look at several transferable skills resume examples.
Let’s say you’re a customer service worker with at a software company, eying a career transition to an account manager role in a digital marketing agency. When applying for jobs, you can file a combination resume with a longer resume summary and featured skills section, where you describe your transferable soft skills like persuasion, negotiation, expectation management, adaptability, and personal resilience.
Some great customer service transferable skills include:
- Empathy
- Active listening
- Commercial awareness
- Sales skills
- Patience
- Positive attitude
Or you may be working on a new internship resume, where you want to land a design position in a new industry e.g., automotive over ecommerce. In this case, you should emphasize your transferable hard skills like typography, branding, print production, animation, or user research.
Big List of Transferable Skills For a Resume
Remember: role-specific skills can be easily taught — employers know that and thus focus more on finding people with good core competencies and soft skills. A recent study found that employers increasingly value soft skills that enhance human interactions and foster rich, people-centered company cultures.
So if you’re on track to change a job and lack some work experience, place a greater emphasis on the following transferable skills.
Analytical Skills
Analytical skills denote your abilities to think critically, process information effectively, and draw conclusions. A person with an analytical mindset relies on logical reasoning to solve everyday problems and can uncover hidden patterns in data and present them to others.
What’s even more important is that nearly every industry needs people with good analytical and problem-solving skills. Over a third of marketing teams lack people with strong data and analytics skills. In the tech industry, people leaders say data security skills (60%) are hard to find.
To showcase your proficiency in this area, try including the next analytical skills in your resume:
- Reporting
- Data mining
- Forecasting
- Brainstorming
- Researching
- Reporting
- Troubleshooting
- Strategic analysis
- Data visualization
- Predictive modeling
- Reporting and presentation
- Business intelligence tools
- Quantitative research
- Qualitative research
Check out even more examples of analytics skills.
Communication Skills
Great workplaces run on stellar communication. So understandably, most employers look for people who can coherently interact with others and more importantly — listen to what their colleagues, managers, and other stakeholders are trying to say to them.
All of the above makes good communicators and an in-demand asset to any company. So if you are one, highlight the following transferable skills on your resume:
- Active listening
- Oral communication
- Persuasion
- Meeting facilitation
- Negotiation
- Conflict management
- Mediation
- Storytelling
- Interviewing
- Constructive feedback
- Email etiquette
- Telephone etiquette
- Influencing others
- Building rapport
Learn more about which interpersonal skills to list on your resume.
Management Skills
It doesn’t matter whether you held a formal ‘manager’ title or not. If you can create concrete plans, rally people around the set goals, and oversee the successful competition of the set initiative, chances are that you have some good managerial skills.
Also, ‘management’ is a rather lofty concept these days and can cover anything from leading a team of two marketing interns to heading a 1,000-person department. But, in both cases, good managers share a host of similar skills such as:
- Project management
- Planning
- Monitoring
- Logistics
- Action planning
- Risk management
- Scheduling
- Quality control
- Performance management
- Process optimization
- Employee development
- Process improvement
- Resource allocation
- Crisis management
Check out more management skills examples for a resume.
Organizational Skills
Similar to management skills, organizational skills indicate your ability to set priorities, manage your time, and meet expectations (and rally others to do so). People with strong organizational skills boast great personal productivity — a quality all employers value.
Moreover, they can bring the method to the madness during teamwork, helping others get back on track and deliver on the joint initiative. Therefore, give the following organizational skills a good spotlight on your resume:
- Prioritization
- Task management
- Schedule management
- Coordination
- Multitasking
- Delegation
- Budgeting
- Meeting deadlines
- Flexibility
- Recordkeeping
- Team coordination
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Workflow optimization
- Continuous improvement
Browse more organizational skills examples.
Digital Skills
Given the current rate of digitization across industries, most employers expect job candidates to be ‘digitally literate’.
Digital literacy indicates your ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.
In other words, modern workplaces need people who are comfortable with an array of software and can use it effectively in their day-to-day work. Yet, one-third of US workers lack foundational digital skills. So you’ve got a good chance of standing out by showcasing the next digital literacy skills:
- Graphic design
- Social media management
- Office 365 and other office suites
- CRM software
- Project management software
- Web (HTML, CSS, CMSs)
- Low-code tools knowledge
- Cybersecurity awareness
- Digital collaboration tools
- Webinar/podcast hosting
- Remote desktop tools
- Digital content creation
- Gen AI prompt tuning
- Digital ethics
How To Decide Which Transferable Skills To Add To Your Resume
No matter which background you are coming from, high chances are that you already possess some of the key skills employers look for today. Here’s how to determine which transferable skills you have and pack these into an amazing resume.
1. Create a Skill Set Inventory
You will have a hard time showcasing your skills to a prospective employer if you don’t know what they are or how to define them. Think about all the soft and hard skills you have gained from:
- Your full-time job
- Part-time jobs and side gigs
- Training, certifications.
- Education
- Volunteering
- Leisure projects & hobbies
Write down all the ideas into a master list you’ll then tap into when writing your resume.
2. Cross Match Your List Against Job Ads
Once you have created your skills list, go to an online job board, and use your skills like keywords in their search engine. Take a step back and observe whether there is any recognizable pattern to your searches.
If you find that a particular sort of job opportunity keeps on popping up with your chosen skills keywords, then you may find yourself well suited to this role or industry. Browse several job descriptions in your new industry. Look for the specific keywords the employer marks as vital for the role. Hint, they are usually in the Requirements section. Write these down and compare the overlaps with your list.
3. Mirror The Company’s Language
When browsing job descriptions, you may soon realize that most companies use a similar ‘jargon’ — repetitive buzzwords and industry terms — to describe what they do and which type of person they’d like to see onboard.
Also, in some cases, employers often use certain terms interchangeably. For example, someone wants to hire a Content Strategist, while another agency looks for an Editorial Lead. While the terms are different, the high chances are that they after the same skill sets.
So take note of the industry variations and customize your resume to each company. This way, you’ll whizz past their applicant tracking software, plus position yourself as a good cultural fit.
Conclusion
You already have valuable transferable skills under your belt. That’s a fact. But it takes some reflection and research to identify these, especially if you’ve been in the same role for quite a while. Start browsing similar job descriptions, and pick up some new lingo for your resume. Understand which new roles have emerged and what qualifications are now in demand. Invest some time into honing those emerged variations of skills.
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