Transferable skills: how to find yours and use them

In short

• Think in tasks, not titles or single words. “Explained outages to customers” says more than “communication”.
• For each task, note one piece of evidence: a result, a number, something you built.
• Mark each task as energizing, neutral or draining. Build on the energizing ones.
• Look for roles whose core tasks match yours. That’s where your experience counts most.
• Show skills through specific results on your CV, in the target job’s words.

What are transferable skills?

They’re abilities you built in one job that are useful in others. “Skill” words like communication, leadership or problem-solving are too vague to help much on their own. Everyone claims them. What’s useful is the concrete task behind the word: what you did, for whom, and what came of it.

Tasks are also what actually moves between jobs. Research suggests that skills carry over well between occupations that share similar tasks, and that people tend to move between such jobs, even when the titles look unrelated. A support engineer and a technical trainer have different titles but share a core task: explaining complex problems to people who aren’t experts.

How to list your transferable skills

Set aside about half an hour and a blank page or spreadsheet.

1. List your roles. The last two or three jobs, plus anything outside work that took real effort: volunteering, a side project, caring for someone, organising an event.
2. Write five to ten tasks for each. Use a verb, an object and who it was for. “Ran weekly planning with three teams.” “Wrote the onboarding guide new hires still use.” Not “stakeholder management”.
3. Add evidence. For each task, one result or detail you could mention in an interview: how often, how many, what changed because of it.
4. Mark the energy. Energizing, neutral or draining. Go with your first reaction. Being good at a task doesn’t mean you want more of it.
5. Group into themes. Tasks that look alike across roles form a theme: explaining, organising, analysing, building, persuading, caring. The themes you marked energizing in more than one role are your strongest transferable skills.

This is the same method our app uses: it reads your CV for tasks, asks how each kind of work felt, and keeps track of the evidence for you.

Transferable skills list: examples by background

These examples start with roles in tech. The tasks are typical, not a checklist, and the last column shows directions where those tasks are central. They’re examples to spark ideas, not recommendations. Your own list will depend on what you actually did and enjoyed.

If you’re a teacher, our guide to jobs for former teachers goes deeper on this, with US pay data.

Which transferable skills should you build on?

Not all of them. A skill you’re good at but find draining is a trap: it’s easy to get hired for, and you end up doing more of what wore you out. Build on the themes that are both strong (good evidence) and energizing.

Your interests are the other half. Studies consistently show that when the kind of work matches what you enjoy, people tend to do better and stay longer. The link with job satisfaction is real but smaller. Our free career interest test takes a few minutes and shows which of six kinds of work you lean towards, such as investigative or enterprising.

How to show transferable skills on a CV

Show, don’t claim. Research suggests that specific accomplishments do better on a CV than lists of duties or self-praise, and that heavy self-promotion can backfire. So not “excellent communicator”, but “explained a long outage to our largest customers and kept them”, if that’s what happened.

• Use the job ad’s words where they’re true. Employers often filter and rank applications on the exact terms in their criteria. If you “onboarded clients” and the ad says “customer onboarding”, use their phrase.
• Frame the move as a next step. Research suggests employers hire people whose path looks like related steps more often than people with unrelated jumps. Put the transferable tasks first in each role, and say in one line why the new role follows from them.
• Don’t rely on a skills-only CV. Skills-based hiring gets a lot of attention, but a large study found that dropping degree requirements changed very few actual hires. Keep your work history in date order and show the skills inside it.

From transferable skills to a new direction

Once you have your energizing themes, look for roles where those tasks are the main job. Start close to what you’ve done. In a randomised trial, showing job seekers related occupations based on their background raised the number of interviews they got by 44%.

Then read five job ads for each idea and highlight the tasks you’ve already done. If most of the core tasks are highlighted, you have a realistic move. Our guide on how to change careers when you don’t know what to do next takes it from there, and career changes that reuse what you already do lists examples with pay.

Questions people ask