The Importance of Transferable Skills During Your Job Search

Finding work takes marketable skills, and if you're looking to move from one job to another, you'll need to be sure those skills are transferable. Unfortunately, this isn't always easy.

Especially in today's quickly evolving, technology-driven economy, many jobs rely on skills that may be fairly job-specific. Don't get caught with a skill set that leaves you locked into a specific job or company – or worse, one that becomes deprecated altogether. Read on to learn about four ways to maintain and improve the transferability of your professional skills.

1. Evaluate the Transferability of Your Skill Set

Gauging the transferability of your skills is the first step to improving or maintaining them.

Pay attention to how the responsibilities you perform are carried out elsewhere in the industry. Do they use the same tools or software universally? If not, are the ones you use industry standards? What other alternatives are in widespread use, and are they gaining or losing in popularity?

Also, be sure to be mindful of new technology affecting those in your line of work. What positions may be eliminated or merged with others through upcoming advancements? What new positions might arise? Any of these trends could affect the transferability of your abilities.

Keep an ear to the ground by talking to others in your professional circle, reading industry news, and participating in groups that cater to those in your profession.

2. Strengthen the Transferability of Existing Skills

In order to improve the transferability of your existing skills, learn to do your work with different popular tools and platforms. It may seem redundant at first, but it will help you safeguard your transferability and is also likely to also help you learn some new skills and approaches along the way.

It's also a good idea to broaden your abilities with the tools you already use at your job, even if you don't need to in order to do your job right now. The more well-versed you are at using the resources at your disposal, the more transferable your skills will be.

As you do so, pay attention to the packages of skills that are commonly called for in your industry for your job title or similar jobs. If there are any skills that are commonly called for that you don't already have, those are good targets for learning opportunities.

3. Generalize your Qualifications

During your job search, it's also important to know how to generalize your existing qualifications.

Sometimes this is as easy as taking a broader perspective and rewording items on your resume.

In your current or previous position, a task may be regularly called by a specific name. For example, a teacher might be used to creating lesson plans. Applying for another job outside of academia, the same task can be rephrased as "created training materials."

Thinking about your qualifications in a broader way like this can help you and potential employers see the applicability and transferability of your experience.

4. Get Some Outside Perspective

If you're unsure of how transferable your skills may be or how to improve your prospects in that regard, try asking a friend or mentor for help. An outside perspective on your resume and skills might yield applications for your skill set that you hadn't previously considered.

Looking for a job? See who’s hiring at CyberCoders.com.