Build Your Own Transferable Skills Checklist!

Online checklists don’t help you stand out from the crowd.

Hannah Kuspira
6 min readNov 10, 2020

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Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

Have you ever felt stuck in your job? Or you’re thinking about growing in your career, but you’re not sure which direction to go in?

You might be thinking “can I actually switch my career?” or “how do I take my career to the next level?”

If so, you have probably thought about your transferrable skills. In fact, you may have found one of those handy-dandy online lists!

But here’s the thing… everyone uses identical lists and they pull out a few skills that “sound good”. They pick the ones that employers “want” to hear. It’s a trap! You end up blending into the crowd of applicants. And even worse, you have missed an opportunity to better understand your own abilities!

So what actually are transferrable skills?

Transferable skills are the day-to-day things that you do well. They are learned throughout your lifetime and can be applied in a variety of scenarios.

I often hear that thinking about “transferrable skills” is overwhelming, confusing and restrictive. It can feel so concrete. So defined. So limiting.

And yet, if you are a human (since you are reading this, there is a good chance that you are)… your list of transferrable skills should be as unique as you are.

Knowing your transferrable skills gives you options and direction.

It’s helpful to understand your transferable skills when you are looking for the next step in your career. You might really want to make a move from healthcare into recruitment (I know that this seems random... but it's my story) and think “well, if I was working in healthcare administration, how the heck am I gonna have the skillsets for recruitment?”

It’s a valid question! But it's not the best one to ask.

You focus too much on your hands-on experience and forget about all the soft skills that you have learned over time. Give yourself some credit (yes, I'm talking to you)! If you are anything like most of my clients, you are assuming that your skills are “less than”. This is not…

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Hannah Kuspira

I write to empower career-minded young people to live a life of prosperity through the pursuit of meaningful work. www.knowlejoble.com