Finding Jobs to Which Your Skills Transfer in a Post-Pandemic World

Jerry is a restaurant owner and manager. He started the business 3 years ago with one partner and 5 employees. The restaurant was struggling and making a small profit until COVID19 shut down inside-dining and the bar. When they switched to carry out and some outdoor dining, losses started piling up and like many restaurants, they had to close down. Jerry sees a declining future for restaurant management and needs to redirect his career. He has a bachelor's degree in business and 15 years of experience in various areas of food service management. Can he transfer his skills to another field and get a decent job without going back to school?

In 2018 I wrote a blog article how to do a self-assessment of transferable skills. I provided the tools and methods. Fast forwarding to 2021, the pandemic and eventually post-pandemic world is different. Jobs and careers are in flux and how work is done is changing. And we are living differently. If you are lucky enough to still have your job, you may be working remotely, a trend that will probably continue beyond the COVID19 pandemic. Not only may your job have changed, but your occupation may also now be expected to change more quickly and dramatically than during normal times. Jobs in your field may be eliminated with new ones emerging, or facing extinction, or contracting like in Jerry's situation. Maybe there is a burst of different, but related jobs.

With the new scenario, understanding how your strongest skills may transfer to new jobs will be critical to being competitive in finding and keeping fulfilling and reasonably paying work through the rest of your career. In this article I update my past writings on transferable skills with a new perspective and newly developed tools corresponding to the pandemic and post-pandemic era.

There are now several new methods and tools to approach assessing your transferable skills. You can still do this on your own, but seek help from a professional career counselor if you need to clarify further or discuss what you've found before making decisions.

You can start by using tools which use the titles of jobs you have done to find a computerized match to other job titles that require similar skills. These tools are very simple to use, but they depend upon general information about jobs done under a particular job title. That is, they don't take into consideration differences among the same jobs in different places. For example, Jerry's restaurant manager work involved detailed accounting and customer service skills. In a larger restaurant, the manager may use a different skill set and do her job differently. These tools also do not reflect changes in jobs and occupations resulting from effects of the pandemic. Nevertheless, the tools can still be useful. Here are some you can try:

1. https://www.myskillsmyfuture.org/

2. https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/community-development-data/occupational-mobility-explorer

The next type of tool has you rate a standard set of skills. You can then see the occupations which require these skills. Again, these occupations will not reflect possible changes due to the pandemic. Go to this site: https://www.onetonline.org/skills/.  Then place a check next to  your strongest skills and click GO. Occupations that match your skills will come up. You can click on any of them to get comprehensive information about the occupation. To narrow matches that will also lead to your most satisfying work, try checking only those skills that are both strongest and which you really enjoy using.

Finally, you will be able to get the most reliable and specific information by assessing your own unique skills and then relating them to the types of jobs emerging now and post-pandemic, to which they will transfer . Note this method takes time and a lot of thought to get the best results. Here is a summary of what to do:

1. List all of your specific skills from current and past jobs, education/training, and non-work activities. If you are in mid-career, you will typically identify at least 30-40 skills. How you formulate and write your skills is critical because it's easy to confuse skills with tasks, abilities, aptitudes, talents, and personality traits. If you are going to do this exercise it is strongly recommended that you watch my YouTube instructional video Transferable Skills Tutorial for Job Seekers.

2. From your full list, look for skills with underlying similarities and overlap. Combine them into a list of no more than 10-15 skills with a maximum of 12 words each. For example, the skills "Teaching conversational Spanish to immigrant adults" and "Training new managers in supervisory skills" can be combined to "Teaching and training adults."

3. Rate each combined skill on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how well you perform work requiring this skill, with 5 being the best and 1 being the worst.

4. The skills you rate 4 or 5 are the ones you should focus on when looking for transferability to a new job. Again, of those skills, you may want to narrow down to the ones you most enjoy using. For Jerry, our restaurant manager, his top skills were "financial analysis" and "resolving staff coordination problems in delivering services." Those were not only his best skills, but he really enjoyed the work that involved using those skills.

5. With a new emerging job market due to the pandemic, do an exploratory search of what appear to be jobs that are related to your background, in areas of the economy that seem to be on the upswing. You can get a sense for those fields and industries by going to my recent article on that topic. You can do your exploratory search by going to job boards such as indeed.com, simplyhired.com, monster.com, or any of the multitude of others. The idea is not necessarily to apply for these jobs, since jobs posted on general job boards are where competition is likely to be highest, but to read about the required skills for new jobs that are starting to appear in the economy. That will help you determine the types of newly emerging jobs to which your strongest and most enjoyable skills are likely to transfer. Then focus a targeted search on those types of jobs. A targeted search reduces competition by focusing first on best-fit employers and then on jobs in those organizations. See my article Revisiting Job Search and Best-Fit Environment During and After the Pandemic for how to do that. For Jerry, he found that his  skills could best transfer to management analyst work, preferably in large food service operations serving multiple hospitals or medical research facilities. That's where he focused his targeted job search.

In summary, there are now many tools you can use to analyze where to focus efforts in a job search using your transferable skills. You can start with the simple computerized methods to see where that takes you. However, in a job market that is rapidly changing due to current and post-pandemic effects, it would be worthwhile to use all of the methods to come up with the best result.