Maximising Your Skills -

Maximise Your Skills

These days, it’s likely that you will come across different roles and working environments. To reach your full potential it pays to be flexible and adaptable, especially if you’re looking at a change in career. A good way to start is by recognising your transferable skills.

Using your transferable skills

These are the skills that you’ve built up during any job or activity that you can use in other jobs. You can build up skills through all sorts of activities, for example:

jobs
projects
volunteer work
hobbies
sports

These skills can include:

communication – by speaking, writing or emailing in the best way for the audience
teamwork – being a helpful team member, adding to the success of the team
leadership – motivating and encouraging others while taking the lead
initiative – seeing opportunities and setting and achieving goals
solving problems – thinking things through in a logical or creative way to find solutions to the most important problems
flexibility and being able to adapt – changing and adjusting to new situations
being self aware – knowing your strengths and skills and having the confidence to show these
commitment and motivation – having energy and enthusiasm when carrying out projects
interpersonal skills – relating well to others and building up good working relationships
numeracy – understanding and using information such as numbers, statistics and graphs

Identifying the skills you have now

If you think back to past jobs, hobbies and other activities, you probably already have some useful transferable skills, like:

good teamwork and communication skills from working in an office as part of a team
initiative and leadership skills from helping to run a Brownie pack in your spare time

Identifying skills you will need in the future

There are ways to build up the skills you need so you can get where you want to be. You need to think about the kind of job you want to do, for example, in hospitality. Do some research into the skills and experience that this type of job normally needs. Use this to compare with the transferable skills you already have to find any gaps.

Developing new transferable skills

You can develop new skills and experiences in lots of ways. You may want to:

do some voluntary work
take part in a hobby, committee group
do some part-time work
register with a recruitment agency and do some temporary work
go on training course

These activities can help boost your self-confidence and social life too.
Many employers also want to help you develop your skills for work. They may be able to offer you coaching from their employees and training before you start work.

Applying your transferable skills to a job application

When applying for a job you haven’t done before, transferable skills can help you show an employer you have the right skills for the job.

Example

You have switchboard and typing skills, but you haven’t had contact with customers in your previous jobs. For the last three years, you have been a representative for a local Christmas club. You help people to save up over the year so that they can pay for the extra costs at Christmas. This means that you’ve become confident in talking to customers face-to-face, answering questions by phone and handling complaints.