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Ten
Hottest Transferable Skills
Many job seekers ask what hot skills employers are currently looking for in
today’s highly competitive job climate. While some skills are more
transferable than others, identify your most
powerful talents, with the implied assumption that every skill can
find a home somewhere. No matter how you analyze your talents, you
can expect all functional and adaptive skills to have definite
value; however, workplace surveys recognize that certain skills are
universally greeted with enthusiasm by almost every employer because
these skills occur with some regularity in every job having
responsibility and requiring decision making and good judgment. You
should pay special attention to the ten hottest transferable skills
in the work you’re now doing or look for them in the non-paid
activities of your spare time, and comb your past experiences for
evidence of the following ten skills.
- Budget Management – Get your hands on any budget you
can find no matter how small, and take responsibility for it.
Manage how the funds are dispensed, keep control of the budget,
and learn what fiscal control is all about.
- Supervising – Take responsibility for the work of
others in a situation in which some accountability is called for.
Have direct contact with the work of others; expose yourself to
the difficulty of giving orders, delegating tasks, taking guff,
understanding the other person’s viewpoint. Here is where
listening can become a real feat of skill.
- Public Relations – Accept a role in which you must meet
or relate to the public. Greet visitors, answer phone complaints,
give talks to community groups, sell ads to business people, or
explain programs to prospective clients.
- Coping with Deadline Pressure – Search for
opportunities to demonstrate that you can produce good work when
it is required by external deadlines. Prove to yourself and anyone
else that you can function on someone else’s schedule, even when
that time frame is notably hurried.
- Negotiating/Arbitrating – Discover and cultivate the
fine art of dealing openly and effectively with people in
ambiguous situations. Learn how to bring warring factions
together, resolve differences between groups or individuals, or
make demands on behalf of one constituency to those in positions
of power.
- Writing – Go public with your writing skills, or even
the lack of them. There is nothing quite so energizing as seeing
your own words in print, exhilarating if they look good to you,
and a spur to improvement if they look awful. Practice putting pen
to paper. Write letters to the editors of every publication you
read routinely. Create a newsletter at work, or any club or
organization to which you belong.
- Organizing/Managing/Coordinating – Take charge of any
event that is within your grasp. It doesn’t matter what you
organize -- a church supper, a neighborhood event, or a
get-together at your child’s school -- as long as you have
responsibility for bringing together people, resources, and
events. If nothing else, the headaches of organizing events or
managing projects teach you how to delegate tasks to others.
- Interviewing – Learn how to acquire information from
other people by questioning them directly. Start by interviewing
the neighbors, your friends, and other people easily available. It
doesn’t matter what you ask them, but imagine you are a newspaper
reporter who needs the information for a story. Discover the fine
art of helping a person to feel comfortable in your presence, even
though you’re asking difficult questions.
- Teaching/Instructing – Refine your ability to explain
things to other people. Since much of what you learn takes place
out of the classroom but in ordinary, everyday exchanges between
people, you should become familiar and comfortable with passing
information and understanding to others.
- Speaking – Take a leadership role in any organization,
so that you’re forced to talk publicly, prepare remarks, get
across ideas, and even motivate people without feeling terribly
self conscious. Good public speaking is little more than the art
of dramatized conversation, but it must be practiced so you can
discover your own personal style.
If you can offer several of these “top ten” skills to future
employers, you will be a valuable candidate in the job search
process. But also remember to research companies – find out what
they’re looking for in an employee and present those attributes and
skill-sets upfront. Employers want to know what you can do for them.
They need to know that you can do the job. Develop as many of the
above skills as possible and the job just could be yours. |
