Two Simple Steps to Identify Transferable Skills For Employers

When asked to provide an inventory of skills, most STEM professionals will gladly and comfortably lead off with a healthy list of technical skills they learned and use(d) in their academic work. While these technical skills serve them well, often times transferable skills are equally, if not more, important than technical skills for employment; especially for STEM professionals seeking a new career path.

What are transferable skills?

Transferable skills are skills used in one job or experience that can also be used in another. They are portable and can be an asset in nearly all positions that you hold throughout your career. They can be gained in nearly any environment from sports and extracurricular activities (teamwork, leadership, decision making), volunteer experiences (stakeholder engagement, collaboration, persuasion) to working in an academic laboratory (project management, risk management, dealing with conflict).

The Need to Focus on Transferable Skills

If you look at most job descriptions, for both technical and non-technical roles, you will find nearly half or more of the desired skills that companies seek in candidates are transferable. Yet, all too often candidates are communicating their technical skills throughout their resume. And, these resumes are fairly quiet about boasting and showcasing strengths and expertise in the highly desirable transferable skills.

When I work one-on-one with my clients, especially early career STEM professionals, what I find is that most of them are unaware of the numerous and diverse transferable skills they possess until I point them out. 

How To Identify Transferable Skills

If you find it hard to define your transferable skills, try the following two steps in a conversation with a colleague, supervisor, friend, or even a relative.

1. Describe yourself to someone else. I will often start with an exercise where I ask my clients to list five words that describe them. A recent client had the word “creative” on her list. Now, I might view creative in an artistic manner, but she viewed her approach to solving problems as very creative. This opened up an insightful conversation about how she solves problems and by going through this process we came up with numerous other transferable skills during the simple discussion of her explaining to me how she is creative.
2. Think of successful previous work examples. Think about examples from your previous work experience that showcase your successes. Consider which skills you used and how they led to successful outcomes.

In the example from above, the skill that my client wanted to communicate was her problem-solving skills and how she took a creative approach to it. During our discussion, she could easily cite many examples where her peers and bosses highly appreciated and valued her creative problem solving skills throughout her career. If she had spoken about just being creative, some of the context might have been missed along with some of her other transferable skills that were identified in our conversation.

This is a simple, yet powerful, exercise for two important reasons…

1.   It opens the door to identifying numerous additional skills that you possess when speaking to an active listener who is motivated to helping you articulate your full breadth of expertise and experiences.
2. It forces you to be very precise in how you communicate your skills to an employer so you can clearly and easily show them the value you bring as a candidate.  

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