Have you been considering a career change? Chances are you are looking for a new challenge, or perhaps you’re bored in your current role and have decided it’s time for a fresh start.
Taking the step to move into a new professional industry can be daunting, especially when recruiters request experience in a similar role.
While you may not feel you have specific skills related to your new career choice, there’s a secret to using what qualities you already have and their relevance in a different setting – these are called transferable skills.
Transferable Skills – What are they?
There are a range of skills, personal attributes and essential qualities used across most, if not all, industry types. Referred to as transferable skills, they are valuable when undertaking new career opportunities.
Transferable skills are often seen as advantageous to a prospective employer because although many jobs may have specific requirements, there are so many ways these attributes are just as valuable and more flexible.
For example, you may have many nurturing qualities, extensive customer service and organisational skills that you use in your current profession as a medical receptionist, but you want to share these abilities in a different capacity. In your new role as an executive assistant, you still get to assist people, particularly the executive, in a nurturing way while also managing requests and using your organisational expertise.
Essentially, you have the right skills to communicate and assist clients, which is not much different from meeting patients’ needs as a medical receptionist. It’s about your ability to make the correlations between roles to best share your transferable skills.
Identifying What Skills Benefit Your New Career
Essential qualities are recognised as specific skills that are both easily transferable to another profession and are desirable for prospective employers – creativity, organisation, critical thinking, interpersonal, communication, literacy and technological skills.
Narrowing down your most unique skills that are most relevant to your new career choice is the best place to start. However, understanding how these translate can be the most challenging part. It’s looking at all the subtle nuances and translating these over.
For example, a teacher has many and varied skills such as lesson planning, people management skills and creating curriculum are just a few. Suppose the teacher wanted to go into business management. Many of these translate over because the teacher has worked in teams – internal and external (other faculty and parents), and lesson planning indicates an ability to write business plans and create and meet goals.
While many other abilities can be translated from teacher to business manager, it’s about putting in energy and time to understand how these will help you relate them to a new industry.
Share Those Transferable Skills
Don’t hide behind those mad skills; if you’ve got them, use them. Everyone has attributes transferable to another profession should you wish to try something new and take on new challenges.
When looking for the right fit for you, examine what you know you use in your current role and its relevance to your desired profession.
If you’re ready to make the change, don’t be overwhelmed by the technical requirements advertised. Taking one or two of your transferable skills with you and relating them to the new role, is just one step in the right direction.