What Transferable Skills do Employers Look for?
Today’s employers need flexibility to take skills from one role and apply them to another. Here is how you can maximize your marketability through transferable skills.
Jobs today and in the future aren’t about what you already know. Increasingly, they are about what you are willing to learn, adapt and apply for tomorrow’s needs. Roles in sales, business and financial operations and office administration all need transferable skills like writing, managing, strategy and information technology that will still be applicable despite changing job titles.
Here are the transferable skills that are most in demand.
Learnability over the long term
Of all transferable skills, learnability is the foundation. Learnability is the desire and ability to continually learn and grow throughout careers. To keep your learnability skill sharp, take the time to find unfamiliar topics and dig beneath the surface.
Situational leadership
Every leader is different, and every situation is different. But the leader that can adapt to each situation with different approaches has valuable transferable skills. According to Situational Leadership Theory, quality leaders know how to read different needs and provide the right style based on the experience level, difficulty of task and novelty of the situation. Those who can provide this type of flexible leadership can transfer across new environments and be in high demand.
Thriving with teamwork
While automation is augmenting work, humans and teams will continue to need to work together. On a team, there are people who will do what they commit to, while others will not deliver. The team has to manage these situations, so that they do not impact the grades of team members. Being a team player, and possessing interpersonal skills, are critical workplace skills in a variety of situations.
Overall, soft skills are not going away. ManpowerGroup's report — Robots Need Not Apply: Human Solutions in the Skills Revolution — surveyed 20,000 employers across 42 countries on the impact of automation, and found that soft skills that are of greatest value are hardest to find.
Developing soft skill abilities can have an immediate and long-term impact on your career. And those are the transferable skills that will continue to be in demand.