Transferable Skills & Skills Worksheet

College courses teach content, and you learn and hopefully retain that content, especially if you try to be conscious of the experiential learning cycle and reflect on, think about, and apply the content from your college courses to new and different situations.

But there’s a broader dimension to your education as well, which deals with skills that span and transcend course content. What skills do you have that enable you to succeed at your studies? On the other hand, what skills are you honing through your academic course work that you can apply to other situations, both personal and professional?

These are called transferable skills.

Transferable skills are abilities that you can apply to many situations, like portable tools.  For example, you may have developed some communication skills by having to do online presentations in a class, or you may have developed resilience simply by sticking to your studies while holding a job and maintaining a family.

Transferable skills include skills such as:

• communication
• project management
• teamwork
• information literacy
• problem-solving
• conflict resolution
• adaptability/flexibility
• resilience
• creativity
• leadership
• learning how to learn
• and more…

These skills are transferable because they can be applied in many different situations – work, family, and academic.

Do a Google search for “skills employers want.” You’ll find a lot of similarity in lists of transferable skills on different sites such as Indeed.com, NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers), LinkedIn, the U.S. Department of Labor, and many colleges and universities. Employers look for transferable skills because many jobs are no longer static or secure; employers want employees who can adapt to changing needs.

And job-seekers are wise to focus on transferable skills.  According to The World Economic Forum:

• “People in the future won’t have just one career, but many, experts predict.
• As we all work for longer, it will be your core skills that count.
• And to sustain a non-linear career, we’ll all need to be lifelong learners.” ^[1]

Planning your education can involve investigating skills that can be applied to any context. A conscious consideration of transferable skills can help you maximize your education.

This part of the text offers information about various transferable skills that are important for succeeding in all aspects of life as well as with academic experience – skills that will help you adapt to change, work with others, communicate effectively, and engage in lifelong learning.