Transferable skills
The important factors in helping you to get a job are your knowledge and skills. From the employer’s view, knowledge is what you learned in school, skills are what you have done or your work experiences (including temporary works, summer internship etc.). Most employers do NOT expect a lot from newly graduates, they understand that these students do not have a lot of experiences so they look more on their knowledge (The degree, field of study, and how well you did in school). Of course, any working experience will help but it is NOT a key determination in hiring you. As long as you have good knowledge and do well in the interview, you have a good chance of getting hired.
After you have worked for few years, your experience is becoming more important. If you are looking to change job, you must be able to prove that your experience with current employer can contribute to the potential employer. If you are looking for the same kind of work then it is easy, all you need is to make sure that you have the skills that the potential employer is looking for. However, after several years of working, some people may not be happy with their career and wanted to change to another. For example, you graduated in education and worked as a high school teacher but you found out that you do not like teaching and want to change your career into managing a business. Many students studied business and worked for a bank but after few years, they want to switch to technology area, Not as a software developers but as a manager. Of course in these cases, the degrees in education or business cannot help you to change to new careers. You need to have a “transferable skills” that can be applied to the new career. Career changes require that you will have to rely on skills that you have developed outside of your profession.
Transferable skills are skills that you have developed during your working life. They are soft-skills (communication, negotiation, teamwork etc.), analytical skills (research, analysis, finance, statistics, etc.), and organization skills (project management, customer relationship, leadership etc.). Before changing career, you need to spend time to identify your transferable skills by compare your current job to the job that you are looking for. You need to make a list of the new jobs’ requirements, the qualifications and responsibilities then compare this with your transferable skills to identify whether there is a match up that you can transfer from one job to the other.
Once you have identified your transferable skills and they fit with the new job’s requirements then the next step is to demonstrate to potential employers that you understand their needs and convince them that your transferable skills will meet their needs. Make sure to provide specific evidence of your skills and examples of how these skills are going to benefit your new employer. You must incorporate all of your transferable skills into your resume and use specific examples to back up your skills. This will help you develop an effective resume that improve your chances of a successful career change.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
