2020 has been an exciting year for the world with a pandemic, enforced lockdowns, and social distancing that has kept us in our homes and away from family, loved ones, workplaces, and learning environments. While many countries are still managing the pandemic and number of cases, for the time being, we have had to adapt our way of life to the new recommendations that are intended to keep us safe.
This has had another effect on the students who are trying to build their university personal statements and prepare themselves for higher education and a potential career. Visit this site for more information about personal statements.
With a lack of access to resources that help us build key skills for the workforce and interpersonal working relationships, many students are struggling to develop the additional skills and examples of dedication to study that prestigious universities such as the Oxbridge, Ivy League, and Russell Group universities look for in their applicants.
This guide explores some of the most beneficial transferable skills that every individual can use to benefit their study, career, and relationships with others and how you can build on them in the current world where we are encouraged to stay home and reduce direct contact with others.
What Are Transferable Skills?
A transferable skill is a term given to any skill or ability that doesn’t relate to a niche, particular industry, or specific job role and is often useful across a variety of different jobs and responsibilities. Transferable skills are considered the basic skills any employee should have and can transfer between jobs, regardless of what their new role and responsibilities are. They are key things that employers look for in their potential employees. Transferable skills can help employers identify who is going to be a good fit for their company, who is more likely to ‘hit the ground running’ and only require training for specialist or internal procedures and who would be a good hire, even if they don’t have the specific experience for the role.
Best Transferable Skills
Having a full catalog of transferable skills behind you is the best way to make yourself attractive in the eyes of employers. Still, you don’t need to make your CV pages upon pages long to get everything in. Certain transferable skills can be grouped and summarised with your experience and any challenges you’ve overcome that helped you build upon that specific skill. These transferable skills can offer a particular advantage and help you prove to companies. You are the employee they want on their team.
Communication Skills
Communication is arguably one of the most important transferable skills not only for employment but for getting by in life. Being able to convey your thoughts, instructions, or guidance accurately and settle communication differences is a powerful skill that helps support your interpersonal relationships. Communication skills can be built by talking to a variety of people going through all different stages of life and understanding the correct way to explain things that are appropriate to someone’s age or experience. Volunteering is a great way to meet a community often different from your own and help you learn how to help others solve differences and communicate more effectively with those around them.
Not only spoken communication, but written communication is also important, and many people struggle to summarise quickly in written words what they mean or provide too much detail for something that should be a quick read. Emails are a good example of written communication, and one that many people don’t do efficiently. No-one wants to open and read an email that is pages long. They want the intention of the communication front and center and what you are expecting from them clear and easy to understand without getting lost in the details.
Leadership and Team Management
Not everyone has leadership skills, but everyone is capable of learning to be a strong and passionate leader that appreciates and understands the different strengths and weaknesses of their team. Leadership is a great transferable skill that many employees would like to see more of from their employees, mainly because good leaders inspire and motivate their teams to do better and work more efficiently while ensuring conflicts and disagreements are kept to a minimum.
Team management and leadership skills are often built through working in a group with others, whether at school or extracurricular activities. These skills can also be developed by volunteering with community groups that work with children or youth. It can be harder to find these groups while people continue to social distance, but there are still groups set up online to help others in need or vulnerable positions.
Problem Solving
This is another key skill that can apply to many different niches and industries and isn’t just a case of finding simple solutions but thinking creativity and finding the best solution to a problem that has been seen time and time again. The best way to prove problem-solving skills is to give an example of how you solved an issue in the past – this could be anything based on your experience, a life-issue, a personal issue, a work issue, or an issue you had in school. If you give problem-solving as an example of a transferable skill you are good at, make sure you can back it up in your interview with examples and any time that you weren’t able to solve a problem, what you did instead.
Employers want people who take the initiative to solve a problem before it becomes unmanageable, or managers need to step in and use company resources that are better spent elsewhere.
Work Ethic
Taking pride in your work and always giving your best is a key skill that employers love to see in their staff. Individuals who care about what they do and regularly demonstrate a positive attitude both to their work and their job are refreshing to be around and help to motivate others around them. Showing a commitment to learning new skills that benefit your job and personal development can help employers provide more opportunities for development for those who are keen. Work ethic can be a difficult skill to build, and it’s more about your approach to work and your dedication to bringing positivity into everything you do.
It’s never too late to add more transferable skills to your toolbox. During this time, when many people are furloughed or learn/work from home, it’s a great opportunity to use resources like YouTube and SkillShare to improve yourself and add more value to your CV.
