Published 25 Sep 2018

3 Steps to Leverage the Transferable Skills You Didn’t Know You Had

by CoursesOnline Contributors

You’ve been in the working industry a while. Whether that’s a few months or a few years.

At each job, you take on new experiences, learn to overcome new challenges, and pick up skills that can be taken with you wherever you go.

These skills are invaluable and can range from creativity to communication, teamwork to time management. These are called transferrable skills.

What are some examples of transferrable skills?

Leadership
The ability to effectively take charge of a team to achieve a result.
Project Management
Heading up a task and taking on the responsibility for its success.
Data Analysis
Finding, understanding, and digesting a set of facts or figures.

Why do I need to identify these skills?

Think of your professional CV as a house. These transferable skills are improvements that can be made to your house and as a result, add to its market value. As you pick up these skills, you become more valuable to your future employer. Four reasons why someone might use their transferable skills as leverage:

A job in a different sector
An increased salary
A holiday increase
Re-negotiated hours

How can I use my transferrable skills as professional leverage? Furthermore, how can I ensure that they recognise my value as an employee and perhaps how can I increase my salary or increase my working benefits?

Well, that’s where we at CoursesOnline come in. No, we can’t negotiate on your behalf, but we can give you three steps towards leveraging your transferable skills.

Step One: Recognise your worth

You might have been stuck in a job that you hated for five years or been a stay-at-home mum which is a job in itself. It might have been hell on earth, and you only got through it because of sheer perseverance. Whatever the reason, without realising it, you’ve picked up a vast number of skills along the way:

You might have trained a brand-new recruit

Training someone else shows that you can take on the important responsibility of someone else’s teaching.

You might have positively diffused a heated situation between customer and staff member

Often these situations can boil over and result in unpleasant consequences. Your future employer will know that you’re great under pressure and can handle those tricky situations.

You might have organised your locker and kept a tidy workspace

This situation shows future CV-readers that you’re someone with exceptional organisational skills.

You might not see these experiences as particularly valuable, but they are, and they add to your value as an employee.

Step Two: Identify where your transferable skills fit into the job marketplace

To do this, there are three questions that you’ve got to ask yourself:

How many people are likely to have this skill?
The fewer people with that skill, for example, leadership, the more sought after it will be, and the better your CV, job application, or personal pitch will appear.

Those skills that are likely to stand out because of their rarity include:

Leadership and Management Skills
Self-Management Skills
Networking Skills
Planning and Research Skills

How appropriate is this skill within that working environment?
If the job is part of a large team with a strict management structure and shared tasks, your skill of self-management is going to be slightly less desirable than your talent for networking and communicating. Furthermore, if the role requires only data analysis, your talent for communication might not appear as valuable as mathematical skills. The lesson here is to identify key transferable skills that you possess by assessing their rarity in the job market and the relevance to the job or situation that you’re addressing.

How much experience with that skill have I got?
Somebody with years of leadership talent is going to be more desirable for a role requiring leadership than someone with only a few months’ worth. Furthermore, someone with only a few months’ worth of leadership experience is going to appear more valuable than someone with none.

of workers say that their leadership skills aren’t being fully utilised

Step Three: Be confident and believe in yourself

You’ve assessed what transferable skills you have. You’ve valued them, and you know that what you’ve got is a valued commodity in the job market. So, when you’re asked your salary expectations, ideal work-life benefits, and why you think you’d be an asset to the company, be confident and never sell yourself short!

Now that you’re able to utilise your transferable skills, why not look at some career-specific qualifications here:

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