Transferable skills: Finding them in your everyday

Over the past few weeks, I have been talking with many people who have either been made redundant or have chosen to take redundancy like I did. This is an odd experience to navigate regardless of the type, and poses many challenges, and therefore help, guidance and tools are welcomed for any of us going through it.

One of the themes that has cropped up was around transferable skills and how to identify them. This got me thinking about how you may find them in unexpected situations and here I would like to share with you the transferable skills I used in being a novice at renovating, to hopefully encourage and prompt you to identify yours in your everyday.

Having recently bought a house, I moved into the new world of renovations. This was unchartered waters for me and how was I going to navigate this unknown area to have a successful result? I am not a plumber, carpenter, electrician or builder and this filled me with panic, excitement, fear and stress. What if I made the wrong decision or design choice and the house fell apart?

As the plans started coming together I found myself drawing on my everyday work skills, to tackle this like a project and a problem to solve. 

1.      Be curious – how do you know what you don’t know? Having never renovated before there was so much I did not know. I was curious, so I asked and researched. Speaking with friends and colleagues who have been through this before, they shared key pointers and lessons learnt. My curious mind led me to be always asking – how, why, what, when, and where. This not only drove solutions but pushed me to be open minded to new designs and tapping into my creative side. Brainstorming was a really useful technique. 

2.      Communication – working with different trades people, suppliers, languages and cultures really flexes and stretches your communication muscle. Working in global companies and living in a multi-cultural city like London, opens you up daily to rethinking your communication style. It was critical be to clear, concise and ask lots of questions to make sure there was common understanding, especially not being a subject matter expert. Often the basics are a winner - keep it simple and focussed. 

3.      Project Management (PM) - like many of you who renovated before, you are very aware of how bound you are by budget and time, two factors always on your mind, pulling at you like an anchor. Very similar I bet to many of the work projects you have led or been a part of. Digging into PM skills really helped – setting goals, tracking progress, budgeting, team briefings, coordination and negotiation – all being used daily to drive action, coordinate inter-dependencies, find solutions and meet the time and budget deadlines.

4.      Problem solving – Inevitably things go wrong, such as key materials don’t arrive on time that then impacts other work, that design you had in your mind in reality is now not possible, and why is that pipe in a place I don’t want it to be. Problems became opportunities, not only to be creative but also practice design thinking and agile methodologies, seeing the outputs of these come to life in the house. 

5.      Resilience - over the course of this first time renovation, a range of emotions started to show up – frustration, disappointment, excitement, stress, happiness (all very similar to going through redundancy) - but the one that stood out was resilience. A roller coaster of ups and the downs tested my resilience. Combining healthy resilience with the determination to have a successful result, meant I was able to weather those ups and downs. Never underestimate how resilient you are and how much you can embrace growth and change.

The renovation was completed and looking back on this experience, for a first timer I am really happy with the end result. Now it isn't perfect, that the reality, however, a real positive came out of this and that is the large number of lessons learnt that I will not only take to the next renovation but also into my next job.

As you go through your redundancy journey, reflect on what you have done not only at work, but outside of it, that demonstrates your skills and strengths. Get talking with your family, friends, colleagues and network, and you will find you have many more transferable skills than you realised. Wishing all of you the very best in a successful future and don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to share or talk.