Can A Transferable Skills Analysis Help You? Can You Do It Yourself?

In a prior post entitled Tool to Find New Occupations to Which Your Job Skills Transfer, I discussed a simple method to identify new occupation or job possibilities. The "tool" uses your past job titles to match with other jobs that use similar skills. That article generated a lot of interest. So I decided to expand further on how to do a deeper, more individualized assessment of your transferable skills. This article briefly discusses how you can use both types of information for a more precise estimate of new occupations to consider. The individualized assessment is based on your own personal experiences on and off the jobs you have had, as well as the skills you have gleaned from your education, training, and other non-work experiences.

My interest in covering transferable skills in more depth now, comes from the fact that many career consulting clients come to me with lots of skills, many of which are at first "hidden" skills. At the same time a typical expression goes something like this: "I've been in this career (or job) for 20 years. I never liked it. In fact, at this point I feel that I can't stand another day of it! I have to find something else, yet I make a lot of money and can't afford to go back to school and start all over again. So what can I do?"

These situations beg for a way to use prior skills, usually suggesting the need for an intensive and individualized transferable skills analysis (TSA). Using the "tool" is Step 1, which provides some general possibilities based on similarities among occupations that can be subjected to analysis by a computer  algorithm. Going to Step 2 requires a deep self-search to the point of identifying very specific skills from your own experiences. The computer algorithm on which the tool is based cannot do that. Detailed instructions for carrying out a Step 2 type of self-skills analysis are outlined in Chapter 8 (Identifying Job Skills) of my new book, RELAUNCH, Stagnation, Change, and Renewal in Mid-Career and Beyond. That chapter includes the forms and instructions to fully complete the task of identifying all of your known skills and hidden skills, then narrowing to those at which you do best and enjoy using most. Once you've done both Step 1 and Step 2, then you can go to Chapter 11 in the book (How to Find Information About Careers and Jobs) to fully explore the careers and jobs that correlate with your findings. The idea is to identify each of the careers and jobs that correspond with findings from both steps, that is, jobs that you have the skills to do well and enjoy doing, and which do not require extensive, if any, further preparation. After identifying possibilities, you can also then further use Chapter 11 to link to resources that explore education/training requirements, salaries and even employers (with contact persons) who hire people in those fields. This could open the door to informational interviews about the new career/job or even job interviews if you already have the full range of skills and qualifications.