# Transferable Skills: Spotting the Ones You Already Have Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills.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 Transferable skills are the abilities you take from job to job. See examples, how to find yours without much experience, and how to show them on a resume. ## Key facts - Title: Transferable Skills: Spotting the Ones You Already Have - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Building Confidence, Communication - Primary keyword: transferable skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/ ## What this page covers - Transferable skills are the abilities you take from job to job. See examples, how to find yours without much experience, and how to show them on a resume. - Practical guidance for transferable skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Transferable skills are abilities that keep their value when you change jobs, roles, or industries: how you communicate, work with other people, organize your time, and make decisions. You build them through study, part-time jobs, internships, and volunteering, and they count with an employer when you can back each one with a concrete example. If you are applying for a first job with little formal experience, or thinking about [switching fields](/knowledge/setting-goals/career-change/), it is easy to assume you are starting from zero. You almost never are. The harder part is seeing what you already have, and then saying it in a way an employer recognizes. The questions below take those two steps in turn. ## Are transferable skills the same as soft skills? Mostly, but not entirely. Most transferable skills are nontechnical: how you communicate, how you work with others, how you manage your time and your own reactions at work. Those are what people usually mean by soft skills, and they are the most portable skills you have, because they do not depend on any particular industry, organization, or role. Some technical skills transfer too. Data analysis is useful in fields as different as marketing, finance, and research. A skill that only works inside one kind of role, such as writing code in one specific language, is specialized rather than transferable. So the useful question is not "soft or hard?" but "would this still help me in a different job?" ## What are examples of transferable skills? The examples with the widest reach fall into two groups. - Working with others: communicating clearly in conversation and in writing, collaborating in a team toward a shared goal, building a good working relationship with your manager, behaving professionally (being on time, reliable, and respectful), building a network, and persuading people to back an idea. - Managing yourself: organizing and prioritizing your time, making sound decisions within your authority, bouncing back from setbacks, building confidence through practice, understanding your own strengths, and setting a direction for what you want from work. None of these belongs to one job. The person who calmly handles an upset customer at a café counter is using the same skill a junior consultant needs with a frustrated client. Technical abilities with broad reach belong on the list as well, but the interpersonal and self-management skills are the ones that travel furthest. ## I don't have relevant experience. Do I have any transferable skills? Almost certainly. Transferable skills are built in many places besides a full-time professional job: classes and group projects, part-time and student jobs, internships, volunteering, sports teams, and student organizations. A group assignment where you split the work and chased a deadline involved teamwork and time management. A weekend job serving customers involved communicating under pressure and showing up when you said you would. The same holds if you are changing fields. Transferable skills are what let you move into a new role without starting over: the job title, the industry, and the technical knowledge change, while the way you work with people and handle a workload comes with you. What usually feels missing is not the skills but the link between them and the new setting. > 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. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and his words describe a common situation. A move like his does not erase the experience behind it. It just makes it less obvious what that experience counts for, which is exactly what the next question deals with. ## How do I identify my transferable skills? Start from the job you want, then work back through your own history. 1. Read several job descriptions in the field you are aiming for and note the skills that keep coming up. 2. For each one, find a concrete example from your past where you used it: a project, a shift, a role in a club, a volunteering task. 3. Read a description of your current or most recent role, including a part-time one. It often names skills you used every week without ever thinking of them as skills. 4. Ask someone who knows your work, such as a colleague, a manager, or a teacher, which situations show a particular skill. People tend to overlook what comes easily to them, and others often see it more clearly. If nobody comes to mind to ask, or you want a second opinion before you start the list, a structured self-assessment can [give you an outside read](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) on which work skills are already strong, so you know where your best examples are likely to be found. ## How do I show transferable skills on my resume? Name the skill and prove it in the same place. A line that says "communication, teamwork, time management" carries little weight on its own, because anyone can write it. Tie each skill instead to a specific achievement in your work history, education, or summary. "Coordinated a five-person class project and delivered it a week early" shows teamwork and time management without naming either. If you have little professional experience, a key skills section can organize your transferable skills, as long as each one is backed by an example. Where the job description's wording accurately matches your experience, use it: that helps the person reading [your resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-resume/), and any applicant tracking system screening it, recognize the match. ## How do I talk about transferable skills in an interview? The same principle applies out loud. Before the interview, choose the two or three skills the role most clearly needs and prepare a short, specific story for each: the situation, what you did, and what came of it. Lead with the point rather than building up to it, and keep each story brief enough to leave room for follow-up questions. A concrete example from a café shift or a student project is far more convincing than a confident claim with nothing behind it. ## Which transferable skills matter most to employers? The ones that describe how you work, rather than which subject you studied. According to the University of Richmond's School of Professional & Continuing Studies, employers hiring graduates tend to focus on finding candidates with the right skills rather than the right major. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) frames its [career readiness competencies](/knowledge/employability/career-readiness-skills/) the same way: as core, transferable skills that apply across industries, company types, and job levels. For you, that changes what an application has to do. If your degree does not map neatly onto the role, you do not need to defend the degree; you need to show the skills. Which skills matter most for a particular role is usually spelled out in its job description, which is one more reason to read it closely. ## Can you learn and improve transferable skills? Yes. They are behaviors, not personality traits, so a gap is simply something you have not learned yet, and closing it does not mean becoming a different person. They improve the way any practical skill does: you try, notice what worked, ask for feedback, and try again. The catch is that these skills are rarely taught directly, at school or at work, so most people pick them up by trial and error. [Learning them on purpose](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-tools/) is faster. Look back across these answers and the same two moves keep returning: noticing what you can already do, and putting it into words someone else can check. ## What helps you see, and say, what you can do Neither move is a resume trick. Both lean on a handful of underlying abilities, and each of them can be practiced. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns "I don't think I have anything" into a usable list. It means knowing what you are genuinely good at, not just competent at, by looking at how you work, how a task makes you feel, and what results you get. Asking others for specific feedback fills in the blind spots, which matters here because the skills you use most easily are often the ones you never notice. **Building Confidence** works on the belief that you are starting from scratch. Confidence in this sense is not a mood you summon before applying; it grows from evidence that you can do specific things. Every concrete example you write down adds to that evidence, and naming your skills in an interview gets easier each time you do it, nerves included. **Communication** is what makes a transferable skill count with someone else. A skill only lands when you can explain it clearly: main point first, brief, concrete, and adapted to the person listening, which in an application means using the employer's language rather than your own shorthand. Self-awareness is also the part an assessment can help with most directly. The **free Job Skills Test** looks at these three alongside **nine other work skills**, and shows you [which skill to lean on](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in your next application and which one is worth practicing next. ## What you are already carrying Some of this may already sound familiar. If you have shown a new hire the ropes at a part-time job, or talked down a customer who arrived angry, you have used skills that every later job will ask about. You choose which ones to build next, and in what order, and you stay yourself while you do it. Each job change after this one will raise the same question, "What do you bring?", and the answer gets easier to give the earlier you learn to name your skills, which you can start doing now. ## Find the skills you can take anywhere All that is left is to check it against something more than your own impression. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve and points to the ones that will make the biggest difference to your applications and your first years at work. ## 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? Transferable skills are the abilities you take from job to job. See examples, how to find yours without much experience, and how to show them on a resume. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Building Confidence, Communication. ### 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/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/ Preferred summary: "Transferable skills are the abilities you take from job to job. See examples, how to find yours without much experience, and how to show them on a resume." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.