Do You Know Your Transferable Skills?
Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the best selling book, “What Color is Your Parachute? 2008 Edition” wrote, “Most job-hunters who fail to find their dream job, fail not because they lack information about the job-market, but because they lack information about themselves.”
If your industry is in a down-turn, it’s likely that you need to consider employment outside your industry. With that in mind, knowing what skills you currently possess that can be successfully transferred to a new career is very helpful.
Your Transferable Skills are your personal abilities in working with people, data/information, and things. There are base skills from which more advanced skills are developed as you progress in experience. If you are just starting a new career you will operate using simple or base skills, under the training and supervision of your employer. But as you progress with your skills, you add abilities to your base skills and generally are promoted to work requiring less supervision and greater independence. The higher your transferable skills, the less competition you’ll find in the job place and that’s a good place to be.
Don’t confuse transferable skills with traits or work styles. Descriptions such as the ability to get along well with people, or works well under pressure, are your traits or work style that have more to do with your personality, values and ethics. Your skills are abilities you’ve developed. And because 95% of people at all levels and careers, don’t know their own Transferable Skills the majority of people are greatly limited their career and job possibilities.
Also, knowing your Transferable Skills enables you to discuss them with a potential employer. This reveals confidence and helps the employer more quickly assess the contributions you can make to his business.
The above is an excerpt from the free, day-long intensive seminar available for presenation by Pam Christian. Included within her Workbook is a Transferable Skills Quiz, which she is making available to you for FREE. Send her an email with the words “Transferable Skills” typed in the subject line to receive your FREE Transferable Skills Quiz. Write to pam@pamelachristianministries.com
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