Think Outside the Box - Think about Transferable Skills

You acquire transferable skills in your everyday workplace without even knowing it. You transfer skills from one situation, activity or job to another, including your future professional endeavors. They are action verbs, which become handy as you use them in your resume or self-accomplishment statements—a perfect time of year to be thinking about this. At work, how do you take all those great skills—whether interpersonal, communication, leadership, technical, organizational or a host of other skills—and translate them to you future career pursuits? Start by acknowledging all that you know and do. These are your gifts, your talents. You may have more transferrable skills than you currently realize. If you have not scanned your skills lately, look at the UC Davis Career Management Toolkit Transferable Skills Assessment to take an inventory of what you already possess. Know that your expertise and experience from the past point to your value in the future. Many of you are regular attendees at the Career Catalyst noontime workshops, and if you missed the recent one on Transferable Talent: Thinking Outside the Box by Lisa Montanaro, here is a link to the four-page handout. You will find great information about why transferable skills matter, and how to feature them. Think about your transferable skills, as a savvy, future-focused professional.

About the Author

Carina Celesia Moore

Carina Celesia Moore, M.A., SPHR, CPLP, is Director of HR Talent Management and Development at the University of California, Davis. In this role Carina provides leadership and strategy in talent management (including learning and development and work life) for the UC Davis campus and UC Davis Health. She oversees delivery of talent management human resources services by providing strategic advice to departments and units. Carina has also been an instructor at UC Davis Extension and has served as part-time faculty at CSU Sacramento in the Graduate Career Counselor Education Department. Before joining UC Davis, Carina worked at Connecticut College, Vassar College and a distance learning consulting firm. She earned a master's degree in curriculum and teaching from Columbia University, Teachers College.