What are transferable skills?

Common transferable skills include communication, organisation and planning, problem solving, customer service, teamwork, leading people, negotiating, working with data, and learning new tools quickly. They are often soft skills, but some hard skills transfer too: spreadsheet modelling learned in finance is just as useful in operations.

For employers, transferable skills are the basis of hiring from outside the obvious talent pool: career changers, people returning to work, veterans, graduates from unrelated courses and internal candidates moving between functions. A retail shift manager, for example, has usually handled scheduling, cash reconciliation, staff coaching and difficult customers, which are much of what an operations coordinator role asks for.

The challenge is seeing those skills, because CVs describe them in the language of the previous job. Two things help. First, write job requirements as capabilities (“plans and tracks work for a team of eight”) rather than as titles or years in a specific industry. Second, assess candidates on the work itself, with a work sample or job simulation, so a career changer can show they can do the job even if their CV does not use your industry’s vocabulary. This is the core idea of skills-based hiring.

Inside the organisation, mapping transferable skills helps with redeployment and internal mobility, for example when one team shrinks and another is hiring.

Also called: portable skills, transferrable skills.