Levett Career Center

Assessing Transferable Skills

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Employers seek candidates who have related "transferable" skills even if those strengths were developed in unrelated settings. Once you have identified a possible career goal, it's a good idea to research the skills that that field requires and to start intentionally building them through your classes, work, and activities.
Step 1: Identify a job you are interested in.

Review the assessment of your sense of purpose to help you identify a specific job you are interested in.
Step 2: Assessing your transferable skills.

Focusing on the job you named in Step 1, enter a list of the most important tasks of that job, one per box, under "Job Task" below. For help, look the field up on O*Net or search online for a job description for the field. Always write each task beginning with an active verb (for example, "plan educational events for children").

After you have listed the tasks, use the boxes at the right to list as many ways as possible that you have done these tasks in the past, whether through the classroom, work experience, or extracurricular activities (for example, "serve as a mentor in CMFK"). If you have no related experience for a task, leave it blank for now. Review your experiences to help jog your memory.
Job Task Example of Your Related Experience
 

Here are some tips to help:

  • Find at least one internship! Visit the Levett Career Center to get help with the search.
  • Look for ways to be given additional responsibility in your current activities and jobs.
  • Work to clarify your sense of what the field requires by having an informational interview with an alum in the profession. Ask them for strategies to gain related skills.
  • Use O*Net to identify skills employers are seeking.
  • Search for people in the field on LinkedIn and note the types of skills they list in their profile as well as the settings in which they gained those skills.
  • Record your progress on your co-curricular portfolio under interpersonal development.
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