5 Steps to Identify Transferable Skills to Transition into Tech
If you’ve been thinking about a career in IT, chances are you’ve been told to use your transferable skills for your Tech career transition. However, no one ever really says how you should identify those transferable skills. I’m going to use this post to tell you the exact 5 steps to identify transferable skills you can use to transition into Tech.
You do need some skills and you need to show how those skills relate to the Tech career that you’re pursuing.
Consider these questions.
- Have you been told to use transferable skills to get into Tech?
- Have you wondered about how to identify those transferable skills?
- Is writing scripts or code NOT your style?
If you answered Yes to any of these questions, then keep reading this post.
In this post, I will share 5 easy-to-follow steps to identify your transferable skills that you can use for your Tech career transition.
Let’s start off by defining transferable skills.
What are transferable skills?
Transferable skills refer to expertise that you have that can be used for different job roles. You can acquire skills through life experiences, school work or job tasks. There are generally two types of skills: hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills refer to expertise that is gained to tackle job-specific tasks. These can be gained through courses and on-the-job training.
Examples of hard skills include:
- Website development
- Coding
- IT Controls Testing
- Application Controls Review
- Security Testing
Soft skills are capabilities based on traits and interpersonal skills that are innate or learned. These can complement hard skills.
Examples of soft skills include:
- Communication
- Project Management
- Teamwork
- Analytic or Problems-solving skills
- Creative thinker and attention to detail
- Conflict Resolution skills
Now that you know what transferable skills are, let’s talk about how to identify them.
5 Steps to Identify Transferable Skills
Step 1: Review your prior experiences
The first step is to think about ALL your prior experience and write down ALL the roles that you’ve held. Then write down all the skills that you utilized or learned while in those roles. This is a brain dump exercise, so try not to exclude any skill from the list. The goal is identify as many transferable skills as possible.
Step 2: Group your identified skills
The next step is to group the skills you listed in the first step into categories. To get started, you can use the following categories that we already talked about: soft skills and hard skills. Please refer to the definition and examples of soft and hard skills above. By grouping your identified skills, you will be able to easily map them as transferable skills later.
Step 3: Identify your target job role
Once you have completed your skills identification and categorization, you will then review the job description for your target job role. This involves a few steps.
- First, research your target job role and find one (or two) that you really want to pursue
- Second, review the job description for the role and identify the skills required for the job role
- Third, write down all the skills required for your target job role and categorize them by soft skills and hard skills
Step 4: Match your identified skills with the skills required for your target role
The next step is to match your skills that you identified in the first two steps to the skills required for the job role in the third step. This can take some time, but if you categorized your skills and the job role skills well, then it should be a little bit easier to manage. Remember, job descriptions typically include both soft and hard skills, so you should try to match both sets of skills when reviewing the list.
Step 5: Rewrite the description of your transferable skills
Finally, you want to write (or rewrite) the description of your transferable skills to match the required skills for your target role. I’ll be honest, this will take some copywriting skills but with practice, you’ll get it right.
If you have the funds, you can work with a resume writer to help you reword the skills as appropriate. I recently found out that Indeed.com has a new and relatively resume service. You can check out their resume review options and see how they can help to rewrite some of your identified transferable skills.
Examples of rewritten transferable skills
Below are some examples of rewritten transferable skills that can help with your transition into Tech.
- Prior experience working on team projects.
- Collaborated with project teams members to complete projects on time and within budget while complying with departmental compliance requirements
- This can work for an IT project management or scrum master role because the candidate is able to show some experience managing people and projects.
- Executive Assistant responsible for tracking employee compliance with training completion
- Increased departmental compliance efforts by 30% by providing training to employees on compliance requirements.
- This can work for a Technology compliance role because the candidate is able to show some experience with compliance roles
- Accountant with prior accounting audit experience
- Led the identification of relevant business processes and the supporting systems in-scope for annual SOX testing.
- This can work for an IT Audit role because the candidate is able to show prior auditing experience in areas that are related to IT.
There you have it! The 5 steps that you can follow to identify transferable skills to use when transition to Tech. Will you be following these steps to identify your transferable skills? If you follow the steps, please be sure to post a comment and let me know how it went.
