List of Transferable Skills

Do not worry about drafting examples on the skills at this time. First, understand your core strength and highlight as many skills as possible without thinking about the relevance to your job. It will help you to know your strength and weakness in different skills.

The second step is to group the skills crucial to success in jobs. You can go through the exercise more than once to satisfy your confidence in your answers. Then start collecting examples from your past works once you have finished the list. You may have used more than one skill to solve a problem at the jobs and achieve positive results. Those will be called your achievements.

At the same time, recall the events where you have used various skills to solve a problem but not able to get the desired results. Those events will be called your failure to achieve your goals. Note down the lesson you have learned from those failures.

This activity will give you the confidence to face the interview and highlight your experience with the required skills.

  • Sensitivity to others
  • Treating people fairly
  • Listening intently
  • Communicating warmth
  • Establishing rapport
  • Understanding human behavior
  • Empathy
  • Tactfulness
  • Cooperative team member
  • Avoiding stereotyping people
  • Feeling comfortable with different kinds of people
  • Fun person to work with
  • Treating others as equals
  • Dealing effectively with conflict
  • Helping clarify misunderstanding
  • Creating an environment of social interaction

 

  • Helping people
  • Patient with difficult people
  • Responsive to people’s feelings and needs
  • Counseling/Empowering
  • Encouraging people
  • Assisting people in making decisions
  • Enhancing people’s self-esteem
  • Working effectively with those often ignored or considered undesirable
  • Letting people know you really care about them
  • People sense you feel what they’re feeling
  • Helping people help themselves
  • Encouraging others to expand and grow
  • Facilitating self-assessment and personal development
  • Instilling the love of a subject
  • Perceptively answering questions
  • Explaining difficult ideas and concepts
  • Creating a stimulating learning environment
  • Enabling self-discover
  • Encouraging creativity
  • Effectively using behavior modification
  • Teaching at the student’s or group’s level
  • Training people at work
  • Developing training materials that enhance and speed up learning
  • Keeping classes interesting
  • Presenting interesting lectures
  • Creating the sense of being part of a caring group
  • Assessing learning styles of individuals and tailoring training
  • Presenting written or spoken information in a logical step-by-step fashion that builds a solid foundation for future learning
  • Sensing when people aren’t
  • “getting” it
  • Being able to rephrase points so people “get” it
  • Quickly establishing rapport with a group
  • Developing and effectively using audio-visual aids
  • Maintaining productive group
  • discussions
  • Leader
  • Motivating/Inspiring people
  • Getting elected/getting selected as a group leader
  • People believe in you/trust you
  • Causing change
  • Stirring people up
  • Making difficult decisions
  • People are motivated to follow your lead and recommendations
  • Fighting the establishment or unfair policies
  • Accepting responsibility for failures
  • Decisive in crisis situations
  • Sound judgment in emergencies
  • Settling disagreements
  • Open to other people’s ideas
  • A person of vision
  • Getting others to share your vision
  • Recognizing the need for change and willing to undertake it
  • Perceived as a person with high integrity
  • Recognizing windows of opportunity
  • Recognized as one worthy of taking the lead
  • Sensing when to compromise and when to fight
  • Reputation for being highly reliable and taking on new responsibilities
  • Giving credit to others
  • Seeing the big picture
  • Completing projects on time
  • Setting priorities
  • Breaking through the red tape
  • Organizing projects and programs
  • Managing projects
  • Establishing effective policies/procedures
  • Negotiating and getting desired results
  • Working closely and smoothly with others
  • Gaining trust and respect of key people
  • Making effective recommendations
  • Anticipating problems and issues and preparing alternatives
  • Taking the initiative when opportunity appears
  • Effectively overseeing a myriad of details
  • Handling details well without losing sight of the big picture
  • Responsive to other’s needs
  • Finding and obtaining the resources necessary for a task
  • Making those above me look good
  • Getting people at all levels to support and implement decisions which have come down from the top
  • Implementing new programs
  • Working effectively with superiors and people in other work units
  • Gaining the cooperation of people or groups even when not possessing authority over them
  • Turning around negative situations
  • Obtaining allies
  • Getting maximum output from people
  • Understanding human motivation
  • Developing a team that truly works together
  • Training and developing staff
  • Encouraging people to seek personal and professional growth
  • Developing a smooth functioning organization
  • Effectively disciplining when necessary
  • Creating an environment for people to trust and respect each other
  • Supervising difficult people
  • Delegating work effectively
  • Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of others
  • Consistently recruiting and hiring good promotable people
  • Holding profitable meetings
  • Increasing morale
  • Staying in touch/ Communicating with staff
  • Mediating
  • Effectively cross-training staff
  • Encouraging people to want to do their best
  • Helping people become all they are capable of
  • Reducing turnover
  • Minimizing complaining and backbiting
  • Influencing others’ ideas and attitudes
  • Mediating between groups
  • Obtaining consensus among diverse groups
  • Effectively selling ideas to top people
  • Getting people to change their views on long-held beliefs
  • Getting people to value something not previously valued
  • Getting departments or organizations to take desired action
  • Getting people/clients/ customers to reveal their needs
  • Really listening to people and sensing their true needs
  • Developing a strong knowledge base so questions can be answered
  • Selling yourself, products, services, and ideas to others
  • Closing a deal
  • Gaining support from those impacted by decisions/changes
  • Helping people see the benefits of a course of action
  • Holding the attention of a group
  • Strong, pleasing voice
  • Clear enunciation
  • “Reading” a group
  • Impromptu speaking
  • Thinking quickly on your feet
  • Telling stories
  • Using humor
  • Handling questions well
  • Getting a group to relate to you
  • Coming across as sincere and spontaneous
  • Making convincing arguments
  • Providing clear explanations of complex topics
  • Presenting ideas in a logical, integrated way
  • Solid ability with basic arithmetic
  • Multiplying numbers in your head
  • Figuring out “story” problems
  • Adding long columns of figures
  • Figuring out percentages
  • Recognizing patterns and relationships in numbers
  • Gaining lots of valuable information from graphs, tables, and charts
  • Quickly spotting numerical errors
  • Sensing when an answer or number could not logically be correct
  • Storing large amounts of numerical data in your head
  • Making decisions based on numerical data
  • Making rough calculations/ estimates in your mind
  • Analyzing statistical data
  • Interpreting/evaluating data
  • Evaluating reports and recommendations
  • Analyzing trends
  • Accurately predicting what will occur based on facts, trends, and intuition
  • Designing systems to collect or analyze information
  • Weighing pros and cons of an issue
  • Simplifying complex ideas
  • Exposing illogical thinking
  • Seeing both sides of an issue
  • Synthesizing ideas
  • Clarifying problems
  • Diagnosing needs/problems
  • Breaking down principles into parts
  • Constantly looking for a better way
  • Identifying more efficient ways of doing things
  • Getting to the heart of an issue
  • Developing a budget
  • Staying within budget
  • Finding bargains
  • Estimating costs
  • Negotiating financial deals
  • Recognizing money-making opportunities
  • Ability to buy low and sell high
  • Managing money/ making money grow
  • Setting financial priorities
  • Develop cost cutting solutions
  • Understanding economic principles
  • Eye for a profit
  • Gut feeling for financial trends
  • Ability to get financing
  • Anticipating problems
  • Solving problems
  • Untangling messes
  • Bringing order out of a chaotic situation
  • Determining root causes
  • Intuitively sensing where the problem is and usually being right
  • Recognizing and resolving problems while they are still relatively minor
  • Able to come in and take control of a situation
  • Selecting the most effective solution
  • Improvising under stress
  • Helping a group identify solutions
  • Not stopping with the first “right” answer that comes to mind
  • Handling difficult people
  • Staying calm in emergencies
  • People have confidence that now you’re here, things will be taken care of
  • Excellent taste
  • Artistic
  • Sense of color combinations
  • Sense of beauty
  • Drawing scenes/people
  • Painting
  • Depth perception
  • Envisioning the finished product/sensing how it will all come together
  • Sense of proportion and space
  • Envisioning in three dimensions
  • Spatial perception
  • Designing visual aids
  • Calligraphy/lettering
  • Appreciating and valuing fine works of art
  • Capturing a feeling, mood, or idea through photography, drawing, sculpting, cartoons, music, etc
  • Developing visually pleasing things
  • Applied sense of color, shape, design
  • Conceiving visual representations of ideas and concepts
  • Sensing what will work and look right
  • Sensing what people will appreciate
  • Working well with artistic people
  • Producing high quality mechanical and line drawings
  • Understanding the difference between good and great art
  • Poised and confident before groups
  • Showmanship
  • Responsive to audience moods
  • Making people laugh
  • Getting an audience involved with you
  • Getting an audience to relate to you
  • Powerful stage presence
  • Getting an audience enthusiastic or excited
  • Eliciting strong emotions from an audience
  • Stirring up an audience to take some type of action
  • Entertaining an audience
  • Playing musical instruments
  • Dancing
  • Acting
  • Singing
  • Modeling
  • Poetry reading
  • Working on research projects
  • Researching in the library
  • Knowing how to find information
  • Able to sift important information from unimportant
  • Investigating
  • Tracking down information
  • Following up on leads
  • Organizing large amounts of data and information
  • Keeping an open mind
  • Summarizing findings
  • Designing research projects
  • Discovering new things or phenomena
  • Relentlessly seeking an answer
  • Developing new testing methods
  • Gathering information from people
  • Producing surveys or questionnaires
  • Identifying relationships
  • Detecting cause and effect relationships
  • Collecting data
  • Using statistical data
  • Weaving threads of evidence together
  • Developing hypotheses
  • Extracting pertinent information from people
  • Overall writing ability
  • Writing clear concise sentences
  • Grammatically correct writing
  • Strong versatile vocabulary
  • Developing a logical, well- organized theme
  • Vividly describing feelings, people’s senses, and things
  • Stirring up people’s emotions
  • Creating living, real, believable characters
  • Developing logical and persuasive points of view
  • Summarizing and condensing written material
  • Editing, strengthening, tightening someone’s writing
  • Humorous writing
  • Simplifying scientific and technical material
  • Making “dry” subjects interesting
  • Writing –
    • Letters
    • Memos
    • Reports
    • Position papers
    • Research reports
    • News articles
    • Speeches
    • Manuals
    • Proposals for funding
    • Poetry
    • Song lyrics
    • Fiction
    • Satire
    • Slogans
    • Advertising
  • Inventing
  • Improvising with a machine or tool
  • Assembling/Building/Installing
  • Precision work
  • Operating power tools
  • Using hand tools
  • Operating machinery/equipment
  • Driving cars, trucks, and equipment
  • Fixing and repairing
  • Troubleshooting/Diagnosing problems
  • Figuring out how things work
  • Drafting/Mechanical drawing
  • Understanding manuals/diagrams
  • Mechanical ability
  • Understanding electricity
  • Reading gauges/instruments
  • Making arrangements
  • Scheduling
  • Expediting
  • Concentrating on details
  • Efficient with paperwork
  • Using the telephone to get things done
  • Knowing how to get information
  • Organizing an office
  • Creating systems for data storage/retrieval
  • Memory for detail
  • Quickly spotting errors
  • Thorough understanding of regulations and procedures
  • Cutting through the red tape to achieve a goal
  • Expert at using and manipulating the system to resolve a problem
  • Processing information accurately
  • Pleasant phone voice
  • Learning office procedures quickly
  • Operating business machines
  • Proofreading, correcting
  • Planning problems and projects
  • Setting attainable goals
  • Determining priorities
  • Forecasting/Predicting
  • Scheduling effectively
  • Making persuasive recommendations
  • Using facts while trusting gut feelings
  • Time management
  • Accurately predicting results of proposed action
  • Accurately assessing available resources
  • Anticipating problems before they develop
  • Anticipating reactions of people and sensing whether they will support a proposal
  • Finishing projects on time
  • Sensing whether a project or program will work and making appropriate recommendations
  • Developing alternative actions in case the primary plan doesn’t work as expected
  • Developing innovative methods and techniques
  • Predicting where bottlenecks can occur and preparing workable plans to get around the bottlenecks
  • Considering all the details of a project, even the smallest
  • Organizing/Planning events
  • Organizing offices
  • Organizing systems
  • Organizing people to take action
  • Organizing data/information
  • Making sure people are in the right place at the right time
  • Organizing enjoyable and memorable happenings
  • Intuitive
  • Highly observant of surroundings
  • Long memory of scenes once observed
  • Hearing/feeling/seeing things others are unaware of
  • Perceptive/sensitive/aware
  • Picking up on people’s feelings, reactions, and attitudes
  • Eye for fine/small details
  • Spotting slight changes in things
  • Recalling names and faces of people
  • Imaginative
  • Conceiving and generating ideas
  • Improvising
  • Innovative
  • Creative
  • Inventing
  • Conceptualizing
  • Synthesizing and borrowing ideas, and creating something new
  • Seeing the big picture
  • Developing new theories
  • Recognizing new applications for ideas or things
  • Open to new ideas from others
  • Able to look beyond the way things have been done in the past
  • Refusing to become fixated on a single idea and looking for better ideas
  • Seeing things others don’t see
  • Finding ways to improve things
  • Bringing together two distinct concepts to produce something original
  • Finger and hand dexterity
  • Eye-hand coordination
  • Physical coordination
  • Quick reflexes/reactions
  • Walking long distances
  • Standing for long periods
  • Strong arms/legs/back
  • Running, jumping, and throwing
  • Lifting/carrying
  • Physical endurance
  • Steady hands
  • Sorting things
  • Depth perception
  • Working quickly with hands and fingers
  • Sense of taste, smell, hearing, touch, and rhythm
  • Able to see/spot things others miss
  • Skilled at sports
  • Control over your body
  • Enduring pain or discomfort
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