# A Transferable Skills List You Can Actually Use Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills-list/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills-list.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer A transferable skills list sorted into four types, with what employers look for first and how to back each skill with an example from school, work or sports. ## Key facts - Title: A Transferable Skills List You Can Actually Use - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: transferable skills list - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills-list/ ## What this page covers - A transferable skills list sorted into four types, with what employers look for first and how to back each skill with an example from school, work or sports. - Practical guidance for transferable skills list - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation A transferable skills list sorts the abilities that keep their value from one job to the next into four groups: working with people (teamwork, spoken and written communication), working with data and information (problem-solving, analysis, research), working with things (operating and repairing equipment), and managing yourself (initiative, work ethic, adaptability). You build them through study, jobs, sports and volunteering. If the jobs you want look nothing like the jobs you have had, a list like this can feel as if it belongs to someone else. It usually doesn't. The list is the easy half. The useful half is working out which items are honestly yours, and how to make an employer believe them. ## Transferable skills versus job-specific skills Every job asks for two kinds of skill. Job-specific skills belong to one role or field: a particular accounting standard, a lab technique, a piece of industry software. Transferable skills apply across roles, industries and organizations, because they describe how you work rather than what you know about one subject. The distinction matters because "I have [no relevant experience](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-experience/)" is almost always a statement about job-specific skills. A history degree, three summers stocking shelves and a season coaching a youth soccer team say little about any particular office job. Together, though, they hold evidence of organizing information, showing up reliably and keeping a group of people pointed in one direction. The skills are already there; what is missing is a way of seeing them. > I've worked ever since I was thirteen — paper routes and that kind of thing. But going from practical jobs like that to an office job based on my degree, I had no idea what to expect, or what people would expect of me. It was quite a transition. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us that. Plenty of experience behind him, and still no idea what the new setting would ask of him. Sorting your own experience by type is a way to get that picture before the first day rather than after it. ## The transferable skills list, sorted into four types There is no single complete list. Kutztown University's career center puts the number of transferable job skills in the hundreds, so any list is a selection. What makes one usable is how it is organized. Career checklists such as Illinois workNet's sort skills by what they are applied to: data, people and hands-on work. Some university skills analyses, including Chapman University's, add a separate group for self-management and work habits. Those four groups let you go through your own history one type at a time, instead of scanning a long list and hoping something matches. ### Working with people These are the skills you use whenever the outcome depends on someone else: - Teamwork: splitting up work, coordinating, and delivering a shared result - Verbal communication: explaining, listening, and adjusting to the person in front of you - Written communication: emails, reports and instructions other people can act on - Anticipating others' needs: seeing what a colleague or customer will need before they ask - Understanding how people interact: reading a group well enough to work with it, a skill that functional skills inventories such as the Harvard Graduate School of Education's list under interpersonal relations What sets this group apart is that it is tested in relationships, not in output alone. Most early-career candidates build it without ever naming it: in group projects, in jobs where they dealt with the public, on a team whose season depended on everyone turning up. ### Working with data and information - Problem-solving: working out what is wrong and what to do about it - Analytical and quantitative skills: reading numbers and drawing sound conclusions from them - Researching: finding information and checking that it holds up - Organizing information: structuring material so other people can use it This group is applied to information rather than to people, and coursework is where most students have practiced it hardest. A thesis, a lab report or a long seminar paper is evidence of locating sources, structuring an argument and delivering it on a deadline. The challenge is describing that work in terms of what it would do for an employer, not what grade it earned. ### Working with things - Operating equipment: running machines, tools or systems correctly and safely - Repairing equipment: spotting what has broken and getting it working again These are practical, hands-on skills, built in practical and service jobs: a warehouse, a kitchen, a workshop, a stage crew. They transfer more narrowly than the other three groups, but they rarely travel alone. The job that taught you to run a machine usually also taught you to follow a procedure, flag a problem early and keep going when it got busy, and those belong in the next group. ### Managing yourself - [Initiative](/knowledge/influence/self-starter/): starting what needs doing without waiting to be asked - Work ethic: reliability and follow-through - Flexibility and adaptability: handling change without losing your footing - Organization: keeping your own work, time and commitments in order This group is about how you run your own work. It rarely shows up as a single achievement; it shows up as a pattern. The shifts you never missed, the semester you held down a job alongside a full course load, the project you took on before anyone assigned it. Because it is a pattern, it needs one specific moment attached to make it believable. ## What employers look for first Employers are explicit about which items on a transferable skills list carry the most weight. In NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey, nearly 90% of responding employers said they look for evidence of problem-solving ability on a new graduate's resume, and more than 80% look for strong teamwork skills. Written communication, initiative, a strong work ethic and technical skills each mattered to at least 70%. More than two-thirds sought verbal communication, flexibility or adaptability, and analytical or quantitative skills. The reasoning is simple. People entering the workforce rarely arrive with deep expertise in a specific role, so employers screen for what predicts how someone will handle unfamiliar work alongside other people. The word that matters is evidence. Employers are not counting how many skills you name; they want signs you have actually used them. That changes the question you need to answer from "have I done this job before?" to "can I show I have solved problems and worked well with others?" Almost anyone with a year of study and a part-time job can answer that one. ## How to turn your list into proof ### Pick a handful you can back up With the full range running into the hundreds, claiming everything defeats the purpose. Choose the four to six skills the role you want clearly needs, and that you can tie to a real moment. A short list you can defend is worth more than a long one you can't. If you are unsure which of your workplace skills are strongest, a quick way to narrow it down is to [compare your work skills side by side](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and build your list from the ones that come out on top. ### Attach a moment to every skill Name the skill, then give the situation, what you did, and what came of it. "Good communicator" carries little weight on its own. "Wrote the weekly update for a six-person research group, which cut the follow-up questions to the lead researcher" is the same claim in a form an employer can picture at work. ### Put it on the resume, then be ready to say it out loud NACE advises students to put these skills and attributes on the resume so they get the chance to expand on them [in the interview](/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-examples-for-interview/). Treat [each resume line](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-resume/) as a promise of a story: two or three sentences you can tell without notes, ending with the result. If you can't tell the story, cut the line. ## What makes a list like this ring true Look back at those three moves, choosing, describing and defending, and none of them is really about the list. Each depends on how well you know your own work and how clearly you can put it in front of someone else. **Building Self-Awareness** is where an honest list starts. It means telling what you are genuinely good at apart from what you can merely get through, by looking at how you work, how a task makes you feel and what results you get. Asking a supervisor, teammate or teacher for specific feedback helps, because the strengths you use most easily are the ones you are least likely to write down yourself. **Communication** is how every other skill on the list reaches the employer. Stating the main point first, being clear and direct, keeping it brief: the same habits that turn a vague resume line into a sharp one also keep an interview answer from wandering. They count in their own right too, since written and verbal communication sit high on what employers screen for. **Teamwork** is the skill most of your evidence probably already describes. Group assignments, shared shifts and team sports all ask the same things: knowing where the group needs you, doing the work that has to be done rather than only the work you prefer, keeping your commitments, and sharing what you know. Describing those specific behaviors is far more convincing than calling yourself a team player. None of the three is fixed, and a weak spot in any of them is something you can practice rather than something you are stuck with. The **free Job Skills Test** lets you [find out where each one stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) today, measured alongside the rest of the **twelve work skills** it covers. ## Already on your list, even if it isn't written down You might recognize more of yourself in these four groups than you expected. If you have been the one who turned a group project's scattered notes into a draft everyone could work from, or who kept a volunteer event running when half the helpers didn't show, you already have evidence for at least two lines on that list. Which skills you build next, and in what order, is your call, and none of it asks you to become someone else. Skills like these tend to carry more weight with each step up in responsibility, which makes now a good time to find out where yours stand, while there is room to work on them. ## See which skills to lead with The only step left is to check your own sense of your strengths against something more structured. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes it maps where you stand across all twelve, so you know which skills belong at the top of your list and which ones are worth building next. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? A transferable skills list sorted into four types, with what employers look for first and how to back each skill with an example from school, work or sports. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Communication, Teamwork. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills-list/ Preferred summary: "A transferable skills list sorted into four types, with what employers look for first and how to back each skill with an example from school, work or sports." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.