Transferable skills
Transferable skills are skills that transfer readily from one job to another.
Work experience, paid or voluntary, could provide a good opportunity to develop and apply your skills, increase your self-awareness and build some commercial awareness. A retail job or bar work can give you excellent experience as well as examples to discuss during an interview.
Transferable skills include:
- communication – orally, in writing or electronically
- teamwork – being a constructive team member, contributing practically to the success of the team
- leadership - being able to motivate and encourage others, whilst taking the lead
- initiative - ability to see opportunities and to set and achieve goals
- problem solving - thinking things through in a logical way in order to determine key issues, often including creative thinking
- flexibility/adaptability - ability to handle change and adapt to new situations
- self-awareness - knowing your strengths and skills and having the confidence to put these across
- commitment/motivation - having energy and enthusiasm in pursuing projects
- interpersonal skills - ability to relate well to others and to establish good working relationships
- numeracy - cash handling, competence and understanding of numerical data, statistics and graphs
Questions to ask yourself
- Which of these skills do I already have and how can I describe them through meaningful examples?
- Are skills that I don't have? Is so, how can I acquire them?
- Have I developed skills during my course, such as analytical, teamwork, organisational, problem solving and communication skills?
- Have I developed skills during extracurricular activities and interests that I have pursued while at university? Participating in extracurricular activities can help develop other key skills.
Things to do
- Refer to our booklet on 'How to analyse and promote your skills for work' which is available in our Careers Information Room.
- Create a record of the skills you have used or developed with an accompanied list of examples for each one. This will be useful when preparing for interviews and application forms.
- Ask tutors and previous employers about your skills. Ask them to provide you with feedback about your skills, your strengths and areas where they feel you could improve.
- Research the companies in a sector that interests you to understand which skills they consider important. You can do this by looking at graduate careers sections of employers’ websites.
- Take a look at our CV and covering letter sections to get an idea of how to best describe your skills.
