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Assess Your Transferable Skills -Advancingwomen.com
Assess Your Transferable Skills
One of the most important parts of a job search, and particularly if your goal is to switch careers,  is assessing your Transferable skills. These are skills which you can use in other jobs such as: Communication, Information Management, Human Services, Managerial, Manual/Physical Labor, Personal Attributes, Organization.

Often, when people have been working in the same job for a long time, they become so accustomed to performing their duties that they fail to recognize the skills they have.

It is beneficial to sit down and write out a list of all the things you do in a work day and all the things you do at home as well. It is easy to forget that skills such as problem-solving, decision-making, and organization which you use at home and in volunteering are skills that you can transfer and use on a new job.

A benefit to this recognition of your skills is that you can come up with a variety of Ideas for jobs or places that these skills may be used.

When making the necessary modifications and adjustments to your CV, in order to target a new job or a new industry, first analyze your work history then make the appropriate refinements in your CV/resume.

Producing A Good CV When Changing Career , a British blog makes some excellent points about this which are themselves transferable to the job market globally:

“The key thing here is to consider the job(s) you have already done and to see if you can identify any skills you were able to obtain within these job(s) that could easily be transferable and be considered of value to your new chosen career and to focus upon them.” As example, if you held any kind of position where you had to talk to clients and interact with them to pinpoint their needs, that is a transferable skill whether you’re behind the scenes trying to understand what a client wants in a website, or you’re trying to sell him or her a high tech document management system or a new computer.  You are still trying to relate and discover a customer’s needs.  That is a skill that will fit almost universally into any business and many careers.

“The key point when producing a CV when you’re looking to change career is not to try to erase all of the experience you have gained up until this point but to tailor it in such a way and in a particular order which is likely to give an overall impression that you possess the necessary skills, personal qualities and qualifications that will be relevant to the career you’re now looking to pursue.

What a well-tailored CV will do, however, is make the switch to your new career seem like a natural and logical progression to the person reading it.

Finally, always remember that a CV isn’t designed to get you the job – it’s designed to get you the interview. You can elaborate on the reasons behind your career switch once you get to the interview stage.”

Good luck with your search….. and please share your experience with us.  Let us know if this post was helpful and what you would suggest to improve it.  Thanks.

Producing A Good CV When Changing Career

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