Transferable Skills: Definition, Examples & List

By Nathalie Boutros, Ph.D.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
What are transferable skills and why are they important? Learn how to talk about your own transferable skills and how to hire for the transferable skills your organization needs.
*This page may include affiliate links; that means we earn from qualifying purchases of products.
The average person can expect to hold 12 different jobs in his or her lifetime (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021). With all this job-changing, how can you navigate your career in the direction that you want to take it? One way to improve your career prospects may be to cultivate your transferable skills. Transferable skills are those skills that are useful in many different settings and that may help you perform many different jobs.
A huge range of skills, proficiencies, competencies, and talents may qualify as transferable skills. Some transferable skills are very specific and technical—for example, knowledge of specific software or industry regulations. Other transferable skills are more generic such as a general proficiency with computers, or fluency in a foreign language. A third category of transferable skills are often called “soft skills”, like the ability to communicate effectively and problem-solve creatively. In this article, we’ll review some categories of transferable skills, help you discover some transferable skills you may not even know you have, review how to talk about your transferable skills on your resume, and talk about how to effectively screen potential employees for their transferable skills.

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What Are Transferable Skills? (A Definition)

Transferable skills are those skills that are useful, and maybe even necessary, to the performance of a wide variety of jobs. A skill may be considered transferable if you learn and perfect it in one context, like school, a job, volunteer work, or a hobby, and then can use that skill in new and different situations (Nagele & Stalder, 2017).

Transferable skills are sometimes called basic skills, life skills, generic skills, employability skills, key skills, key qualifications, essential competencies, or key competencies. These terms all refer to skills that are not specific to any one particular job or context but that will probably serve you well across a variety of jobs and even industries.

Transferable skills can be technical, for example, computer proficiency, literacy, and numeracy. Transferable skills can also be non-technical, for example, social skills, problem-solving skills, and leadership. These non-technical skills are sometimes called soft skills. You can learn more by watching the following video:

Video: Transferable Skills

Transferable Skills vs Soft Skills

In the workplace, soft skills are those personality and social characteristics that define your interactions and relationships with other people as well as your ability to manage yourself. Your soft skills may include personality traits, social graces, facility with language, and personal habits.

Soft skills are often needed to successfully apply technical skills and knowledge (Bancino & Zevalkink, 2007). For example, a restaurant manager’s ability to create a work schedule for a large staff requires technical skills like numeracy, literacy, computer proficiency, and administrative skills. Creating a schedule that staff members are generally happy with also requires the soft skills of empathy, leadership, and interpersonal communication. As you can see, a good manager needs to have both technical skills and soft skills to effectively manage a team.

Soft skills can include (Weber et al., 2009):
  • Communication skills – negotiation, active listening, questioning, persuasion, conflict resolution, understanding different perspectives, handling objectives, giving and receiving feedback, building rapport, cooperation, and written communication. 
  • Problem-solving and thinking skills – creativity, analytical thinking, and being comfortable with ambiguity and complexity.
  • Leadership and teamwork skills – drive, vision, negotiation, conflict resolution, persuasion, project management, compromise, judgment, sociability, collaboration, performance management, decision-making, approachability, team formation, norm-setting, accountability, empathy.
  • Ethical and moral values – cultural awareness, professional codes of conduct, diversity management, work ethic, trustworthiness, integrity, and honesty.
  • Self-management skills – self-awareness and knowledge, self-confidence, time management, self-motivation, self-regulation, work-life balance, responsibility, accountability, goal-setting, workplace organization, personal core values, flexibility, curiosity, self-control, and stress resilience.

Why Are Transferable Skills Important

Change is an increasingly large part of people’s professional lives. The average person changes jobs every four years (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021). Even within the same job, you may often change teams or projects. Having skills that transfer from one situation to another may be extremely helpful when adapting to these frequent changes in your roles and responsibilities.

While technical skills that are readily transferable across contexts may serve you well, having soft skills such as ambiguity tolerance, cultural acceptance, self-confidence, creative thinking, and the ability to give and receive feedback may be particularly valuable (de Villiers, 2010). Having a set of soft skills that you can carry from one role to another may even improve your earning potential. People with the soft skills of leadership, planning, and problem-solving tend to have higher incomes (Ramos et al., 2013).

List of Transferable Skills

Skills and proficiencies that tend to be important across workplace settings include (Nagele & Stalder, 2017):
  • Fundamental skills – literacy, numeracy, proficiency with technology, and physical skills.
  • People skills – oral and written communication, interpersonal skills, influencing, negotiating, teamwork, customer service, leadership, and management.
  • Conceptualizing or thinking skills – managing information, problem-solving, organizing and planning, critical thinking, systems thinking, time-management, and teachability.
  • Business skills – innovation, entrepreneurship, and administrative skills.
  • Community skills – citizenship, work ethic, emotional labor, cultural awareness, and expression.

Although skills from each category may be required to do most jobs, the specific skills needed to perform a specific job may vary. Some transferable skills are more general than others. For example, basic communication and literacy skills will probably be required in most jobs. Other transferable skills may not be valued in as many jobs or industries. For example, customer service skills may not be as strongly valued in manufacturing roles as they are in cashier roles.

Examples of Transferable Skills

In 2011, the European Union analyzed 219 jobs from a variety of industries and identified the soft skills, generic hard skills, and specific hard skills necessary for each job (Balcar, 2011). For example, a plumber requires the soft skills of cooperation, communication, orderliness, accuracy, and problem-solving. A plumber also needs some generic hard skills including basic competency in science and engineering. Plumbers need to have these generic, highly transferable skills in addition to more than 19 specific skills including technical documentation, waste disposal, and installation of piping.

Many of the soft skills and generic hard skills required to be an effective plumber were also identified as necessary for other jobs. For example, construction technicians also need the skills of cooperation, communication, orderliness, problem-solving, and basic competency in science and engineering. However, many of the specific skills required of a construction technician, such as carpentry and building maintenance, differ from those required of a plumber. Identifying the skills required to perform a specific job may allow you to determine which of the skills acquired in that job are transferable to a different job.

Transferable Skills Checklist

Transferable skills can be organized into broad categories of specific competencies and strengths (Ramos et al., 2013). Describing your specific abilities may be more informative than making broad statements about your generic skills.
  • Literacy Skills – reading and writing documents, memos, forms, or reports.
  • Leadership Skills – coaching and motivating staff, developing staff competencies, planning activities, making strategic decisions, and managing resources.
  • Physical Skills – physical strength, dexterity with your hands, endurance and stamina.
  • Problem Solving Skills – spotting and analyzing problems, identifying causes, and finding solutions.
  • Influencing Skills – advising customers, persuading others, dealing with people, making speeches and presentations.
  • Teamwork Skills – working in teams, listening to colleagues, paying attention to details.
  • Planning Skills – time-management, organizing, and planning tasks.
  • Numeracy Skills – working with numbers or using advanced mathematical and statistical tools.
  • Emotional Labor – language skills, negotiation, emotion-regulation, and managing other people's feelings.

Transferable Skills for the Workplace

When surveyed, technical leaders report that the most common cause of project failure is a lack of soft skills (Bancino & Zevalkink, 2007). When nontechnical skills are developed, there are often notable increases in personal productivity and collaboration across teams. This translates into improved project success and increased profits.

Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the value of effective and efficient communication. Google has found that the best predictor of a team’s success is whether that team feels a sense of psychological safety (Google rework, no date a). Creating a sense of psychological safety requires many soft skills including communication, empathy, active listening, effective leadership, and teamwork.

Transferable Skills for Your Resume

It can be difficult to communicate transferable skills on your resume, especially if you are a recent graduate or have limited work experience. You may need to be intentional in wording your resume to highlight your skills.

Cognitive skills like literacy, numeracy, and technological proficiency may be signaled by your educational background. For example, a degree in a writing-intensive subject like History or Literature may communicate that you have skills in report-writing. A degree in a more technical field like Chemistry or Computer Science may signal your numeracy skills (Piopiunik et al., 2020). Having any degree, regardless of your major, may also demonstrate that you have soft skills like commitment, perseverance, and learning potential (Di Stasio & van de Werfhirst, 2016).

Interpersonal and social skills, like your ability to collaborate and cooperate with other people, may all be signaled by participation in volunteer activities or team sports (Baert & Vujic, 2018). Activities that have regular meetings, maintain expectations, have rules, involve other people, are supervised, and that are organized around achieving personal goals may signal many of your transferable skills (Cortellazzo et al., 2021).
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There are many different ways to communicate your transferable skills on your resume. In a story-based approach, you identify the personal and professional strengths that each job, hobby, or volunteer experience demonstrates.

Video: Transferable Skills for The Future of Work

A slightly different approach is preferred by management expert and workplace advice columnist Alisson Green who recommends that you showcase your skills by listing your workplace accomplishments (Green, 2020). This approach can be used to highlight your technical skills as well as your soft skills. For example, including the phrase “Revamped help desk ticket system, reducing average response time by 25 percent” highlights your administrative and technological skills. Including the phrase “Acted as a gatekeeper for a busy 15-person department, ensuring all callers felt warmly welcomed…” demonstrates your interpersonal, communication, time-management, and customer-relation skills.

Transferable Skills Assessment

Each job requires a unique combination of skills and proficiencies. Ensuring that a new hire has the skills necessary to perform the job may require that the hiring committee intentionally analyze the job to identify the necessary skills. The Human Resources team at Google, who have collected and analyzed extensive data on hiring and management practices, recommends that employers take the time to identify and enumerate the skills needed to do the job. This recommendation applies to highly technical roles and to positions that require more undefined skills. Interview questions that assess the skills required to do the job should then be determined ahead of time, along with ideal answers that demonstrate proficiency. Each candidate’s answers can then be compared to the model answers (Google rework, no date b). 

According to Google, crafting specific questions with a defined rubric of answers is the best way to find effective employees. They claim that their structured interview process allows them to screen for candidates with skills including learning potential, adaptability, leadership, comfort with ambiguity, collaboration, and a bias towards action, in addition to the specific technical skills necessary to do the job. 

Google does not reveal the specific questions that they use in their assessments and they recommend that employers devise questions that are specific to the needs of the role and the organization. The U.S. Government Office of Personnel Management has resources and guidance on how to assess various generic and soft skills such as cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and even integrity and honesty.

Transferable Skills Ted Talk

Focusing on the skills required to do the job can also help you as a job seeker. You may be able to secure job interviews and even job offers if you concentrate on communicating how your skills may be able to serve the organization. This approach is discussed in detail below.

Articles Related to Transferable Skills​

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.​​

Books Related to Transferable Skills​

Here are some books that may help you learn even more.​

Final Thoughts on Transferable Skills

Transferring your skills from one situation to another may not be easy (Saks et al., 2014). The ability to recognize which of your skills may serve you well in a new situation is itself a skill. Successful skill transfer is an active process in which your skills are transformed and adapted to the new situation. For example, a baker transitioning from a large commercial bakery to a small organic bakery may not be able to use all of the same skills in the same ways. The baker may have to use different machinery and different food safety practices. The new workplace may also require different soft skills like conflict-resolution procedures and customer engagement practices.

When you change jobs, you bring your transferable skills with you. However, you may need to readjust your skills, both the technical and the soft skills. The list of factors that may influence how easily you can transfer your skills is long and includes your intelligence and cognitive abilities, your self-efficacy, motivation, commitment to the occupation and organization, your openness to new experiences, and your career ambitions. Recognizing which of your skills are transferable and what new skills you may need to pursue may be the most valuable transferable skill of all.

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