Transferable Skills Explained: What They Are and How to Find Yours

A teacher explaining fractions, a nurse showing a patient how to use an inhaler and a team lead walking a new hire through the first week are all using one skill. O*NET, the occupational database run for the US Department of Labor, calls it instructing, one of the 25 transferable skills it lists: skills you can use across different jobs, such as communication, problem solving and teamwork.¹ In a 2010 study of German careers, economists Christina Gathmann and Uta Schönberg found that skills are more portable than previously thought, and that workers tend to move into occupations with similar task requirements.²

So finding your transferable skills means looking past your job title to the tasks you do every week, naming them in O*NET’s plain terms and checking which of them a target job also needs. The five steps below show how. If you have not yet settled whether to switch fields, a step-by-step way to decide whether to change careers comes first; this page is about what you would take with you.

What counts as a transferable skill

A transferable skill is one whose use is not tied to a single job. O*NET sorts its 25 transferable skills into five families: complex problem solving; managing resources such as time, money, materials and people; social skills such as instructing, negotiation and persuasion; systems skills such as judgment and decision making; and technical skills such as troubleshooting and repairing.¹

These skills travel because most jobs are bundles of the same basic actions: explaining, scheduling, checking, persuading, fixing. A sales engineer running a product demo is instructing as surely as a classroom teacher; only the audience and the subject change. The skill belongs to the action, so it goes wherever the action is needed.

O*NET keeps several neighbouring categories apart, and knowing them helps you describe yourself precisely. The table sets out how it describes each one.

A restaurant shift manager is a useful test. The job title means little to a hospital or a logistics firm. The work underneath it, scheduling a rota, calming an angry customer, covering a no-show at short notice, maps onto names on O*NET’s lists: time management, management of personnel resources, service orientation and coordination.¹

Myth

Transferable skills are just soft skills like communication.

Fact

O*NET's list of 25 transferable skills also includes technical ones, such as troubleshooting, repairing and programming.

The practical lesson is to describe your work in general verbs a stranger understands, not in your employer’s jargon. “Ran the Q3 vendor re-tender” means something only to your old colleagues; “negotiated contracts and managed a budget” is a line a hiring manager in another industry can picture.

How to find your transferable skills

The quickest way to find your transferable skills is to list what you actually do, translate it into ONET’s shared vocabulary and compare it with a job you want. ONET’s free website helps because it describes about 1,000 US occupations with one shared set of skill and work-activity terms, so two very different jobs can be laid side by side.³

1. Write down your tasks, not your title

List what you did in the last month or two, as verbs: explained, scheduled, fixed, persuaded, checked, calmed, wrote. Include the work nobody asked for but you did anyway, such as training new colleagues. Titles hide this detail; the verbs are your raw material.

2. Look up your own occupation

Search ONET OnLine for your job and open its summary report. Besides the transferable skills, the report lists the job’s work activities, drawn from the 41 broad activities and more than 2,000 detailed work activities ONET tracks across occupations.³ Tick the ones that match your task list and cross out the ones you have never done. If your job title is European, O*NET offers a crosswalk from ESCO, the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations classification, to its own occupations.⁵

3. Put a target job beside it

Now open the report for a job you are curious about and look for overlap. As a worked example, take a secondary school teacher considering corporate training. O*NET’s summary for secondary school teachers shows instructing, social perceptiveness, coordination, judgment and decision making, and complex problem solving among its top five transferable skills.⁶ The summary for training and development specialists shows four of the same five, with service orientation in place of complex problem solving.⁷

The overlap is the story a teacher can tell, and the gaps are the to-do list. All 11 transferable skills on the teacher’s full list also appear on the specialist’s list of 13, which adds management of personnel resources and operations analysis (analyzing needs and product requirements to create a design, in O*NET’s words).⁶⁷ Those two are what the teacher would need to build, or to show from past work.

4. Search by skill for jobs you had not considered

O*NET’s soft skills tool works the other way round: you tick the social and thinking skills you have, such as persuasion, active listening or time management, and it returns occupations that use them. It widens a shortlist beyond the fields you already know. Expect odd matches: when we ticked coordination and instructing, dancers and roofers appeared near the top of the results, so treat the list as leads to investigate, not recommendations.⁸

5. Back every skill with a result

For each overlapping skill, write one specific example: who it was for, what you did and the result. “Instructing” means little on its own; “designed a six-week course that 120 students took each year” is evidence.

Keep the limits in view. O*NET’s ratings describe occupations, not you, and no trial has tested whether mapping skills this way leads to a better career move. Treat the result as a map of where to look and what to prove, and end with two short lists: skills you can prove today, and skills you would need to build or show.

Further reading

• 

  What Color Is Your Parachute?: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success

  by Richard N. Bolles

  The long-running career-change guide built around naming your transferable skills and matching them to work, as this article's steps do.

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Why familiar tasks keep your skills valuable

Skills keep more of their value when the next job involves similar tasks. Gathmann and Schönberg’s 2010 study of German careers found that workers tend to move into occupations with similar task requirements, that the distance of those moves shrinks with experience, and that task-related skills are an important source of wage growth.²

Their earlier working paper explains the contrast with older thinking. Influential economic models had stressed skills tied to one firm or occupation, which do not travel, whereas in their approach broad kinds of tasks, such as analytical or manual work, are useful in many occupations, which combine them in different ways. Their example: a carpenter who becomes a cabinet maker can carry more skills into the new work than a carpenter who becomes a baker.⁹

The study

Moderate evidence

Where German workers moved next, and why their skills went with them (2010)

The researchers used data on the tasks performed in each occupation to measure how transferable skills are between occupations. Workers tended to move to occupations with similar task requirements, the distance of moves declined with experience, and task-specific skills accounted for up to 52% of overall wage growth.² The sample details come from the authors’ 2007 discussion paper.⁹

Career records make this an observational studyobservational study: A study in which researchers record what people already do or are exposed to, rather than assigning anyone to anything. It can show that two things go together, not that one causes the other, because the groups being compared may differ in other ways as well.Full entry in the glossary, with people choosing their own moves, and the authors note that occupation switchers are not a randomly chosen group of workers, which their methods try to account for. The 2007 version covers West German men who started work in 1975 or later, followed to 2001.⁹ Read the finding as a pattern in how skills are valued, not a forecast for your move.

The lesson is to take stock of tasks rather than titles. Two people called “project manager”, one in construction and one in software, may share little on paper, yet both typically schedule work, coordinate people and report to clients. Those shared tasks are what a hiring manager in a third field can use.

Idle skills cost more than missing ones

Among workers who lost their jobs, a new job that left their skills unused was linked to lasting lower earnings, while one that asked for skills they lacked was followed by a relatively quick return to their expected earnings path. So concluded a 2024 study of German work histories from 1975 to 2010 by Frank Neffke, Ljubica Nedelkoska and Simon Wiederhold.¹⁰

The authors attribute the difference to the mismatch itself rather than to differences between the workers who made each kind of move.¹⁰ An earlier study by Maxim Poletaev and Chris Robinson, using surveys of displaced workers from 1984 to 2000, points the same way: wage losses were more closely associated with switching to a different mix of skills than with switching industry or occupation as such.¹¹

1. Overlap: skills both jobs use; research on German careers found skills more portable than once thought, and workers tended to move to jobs with similar tasks
2. To build: skills the new job asks for that you lack; among displaced German workers, this kind of gap was followed by a relatively quick earnings recovery
3. Left idle: skills the new job would not use; in the same study, this kind of move was linked to lasting lower earnings

Both studies looked at displaced workers, people who lost jobs through events such as closures, not at people who chose to change careers, and we could read only the abstracts. The logic still makes sense: a skill you lack can be learned on the job, so the gap is temporary, while a skill the new job never calls on earns you nothing there.

Take an experienced accountant, as our illustration rather than a case from the research. A move into a financial analyst role asks for some new modeling skills but uses most of what she has. A move into a data-entry job needs almost nothing new, but leaves her judgment, client handling and knowledge of tax rules idle. The second feels safer; the evidence suggests it may be the costlier move.

Employers talk about skills, but hiring changes slowly

Many employers now say they hire for skills rather than degrees, but a 2024 report by the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work found that actual hiring changed far less than the announcements. In roles at large US firms that dropped a degree requirement, the share of people hired without a bachelor’s degree rose by about 3.5 percentage points on average: a real shift, but a small one.¹²

Across all hiring, the authors estimate that the change reached fewer than 1 in 700 hires in the year before the report. A minority of firms produced nearly all of it, while many dropped the requirement in name only.¹²

Read that as company research, not peer-reviewed science. The Burning Glass Institute is a nonprofit launched in 2022 with support from Emsi Burning Glass, the labor-market data company now called Lightcast, and the publisher Wiley.¹³¹⁴ Lightcast also supplied the job-posting data the report used.¹² The study measured degree requirements, not career changers, so it describes the hiring climate rather than your odds.

The gap between wording and practice is easy to picture. An ad may now say “degree or equivalent experience”, but if the person screening applications still skims for familiar job titles, a career changer can be passed over before anyone reads the skills. So make your transferable skills visible without translation: named in the employer’s terms, backed by proof, and set out in a cover letter that connects your experience to the job.

The bottom line

Your transferable skills are the parts of your current work that another job also needs, and tasks reveal them better than titles do. O*NET supplies a shared vocabulary for those tasks and a way to set your job beside the one you want. Research on career moves points one way: look for work that uses most of what you already do, and be ready to prove each skill with an example.