With more employers selecting candidates for tech positions based on their skills and growth potential rather than degrees, transferrable skills are fast becoming the new currency of work.
What are transferable skills? In addition to technical skills, transferable skills include portable knowledge, experiences and abilities that can be applied to any role or industry, making them invaluable for career changers.
However, employers view some transferable skills as more important than others. Given that, we’ve identified five of them that can boost your appeal to employers in almost every single industry.
Collaborative Communication
For the second consecutive year, communication skills took the top spot in LinkedIn's Most In-Demand Skills 2024 report. However, simply highlighting "communication" as a macro skill in your resume won’t set you apart. You need to demonstrate proficiency with the “sub-skills” that dictate success in any position or work model, noted Jon Beck, founder and CEO of technical staffing firm Ursus Inc.
For example, given the proliferation of remote and hybrid teams, Beck’s clients are looking for professionals who have the ability to share ideas and collaborate effectively with team members across different locations and time zones. And because visibility impacts collaboration and teamwork, demonstrating the ability and willingness to maintain visibility while working remotely is vital.
Dring interviews, tech managers will be “listening between the lines” to determine whether you seek out your colleagues or prefer to work on your own, Beck advised. He also adds that interactions matter as much as skills. For instance, hiring managers will consider small actions, like whether you send a thank you note after an interview or offer to connect on LinkedIn, to gauge your desire to reach out, engage and collaborate with others.
Problem Solving and Critical Thinking
Critical thinking, or the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information in a logical and reasoned manner, has been called the most valuable skill for the future of work. Even better, problem solving and critical thinking are relevant to almost every tech job and industry, yet not everyone has these skills. How do you prove that you are the exception?
Again, details matter. As you respond to behavioral questions and share success stories during interviews, hiring managers will be listening for the habits and key characteristics of critical thinking as well as familiarity with the steps in the problem solving process to assess your transferable skills and experience.
Providing context and quantifying the results of your efforts can also help you validate and highlight a subset of intangible soft skills that enable the problem-solving process such as analysis, communication, emotional intelligence, resilience, creativity, adaptability and teamwork.
Adaptability
Speaking of adaptability, the ability to remain flexible and adapt is so vital that it deserves its own place on the list. In fact, research by McKinsey shows that adaptability is the critical success factor during periods of transformation and systemic change. Plus, adaptable tech professionals assimilate faster and require less training.
Adaptability shows an individual’s resilience and willingness to learn, traits that are critical to thrive in any industry, noted Peju Adedeji, tech career coach and founder of Your IT Career.
When including these transferable skills in your resume, highlight how you can utilize those skills in the new role that you are applying to (not your prior role). That will help the hiring manager understand the value you can bring to a new company and team.
Stakeholder Relationship Management
Engaged, satisfied stakeholders play a crucial role in the success of any tech project.
Despite its importance, very few companies or technology executives for that matter possess the soft skills or knowledge of the processes for establishing and maintaining effective relationships with the growing legions of stakeholders across a modern organization.
As such, the ability to effectively communicate and build relationships is attractive to hiring managers because it is crucial to bridging the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders.
To demonstrate your mastery of key fundamentals, be sure to highlight your interactions with stakeholders as well as your desire to understand and meet their needs when describing recent project experience.
Digital Fluency
With companies increasingly migrating data, applications and other workloads to the cloud, digital fluency is becoming a highly valuable transferable skill.
In fact, digital fluency is at the top of the “Power Skills in 2021” list, according to a recent report from LinkedIn. What is digital fluency? Digital fluency is the capacity to go beyond using technology for prescribed tasks and to work in a non-analogue, non-siloed way.
So how can you demonstrate a high level of digital fluency when changing jobs?
Point to examples and case studies of how you’ve created something new using digital tools, Beck says. And then go one step further by sharing success stories of how you’ve applied digital fluency to generate positive top and bottom-line results.
Transferable skills that have the potential to deliver monetary benefits are real assets that hiring managers in any industry will notice and value highly.
