Knowing your transferable skills allows you to show recruiters or hiring managers that you are a good fit for a job, even if this is not obvious based on your professional experience.
In 2003 – I was a personnel consultant at the time – a man came to the consultancy with the wish to enter fund research at a bank. Fund analyst was a new job description at that time. So, there were no people with the relevant experience. The client had a university degree in finance and a CFA. He had been covering the financial markets for a business newspaper for two years. I told him that I didn’t see any possibility of placing him in fund research at a bank. I knew that banks required experience in equity research for fund analysis.
You as a candidate know yourself best
The candidate was not deterred and asked me what the tasks of a fund manager were. Without waiting for my answer, he explained that the fund analyst had two main tasks to fulfil. First, he had to interview fund managers and understand their expertise and offerings through critical questioning. He had to be able to form a comprehensive and critical picture in a short time. Gathering information through interviews is one of his main tasks as a business journalist, albeit with other market participants. Secondly, the fund analyst has to process the findings and write fund reports. This editorial activity is his core competence as a journalist. He has the necessary financial knowledge due to his studies and his previous activities.
Recognising the transferable skills
I was speechless. My conversation partner undoubtedly had an ideal qualification profile. With this convincing argumentation, I approached various banks and was finally able to find him a job as a fund analyst. If the candidate had not known his transferable skills and had not matched them with the job requirements of a fund analyst, he would not have made it into fund research. Neither I as a personnel consultant nor the recruiters at the banks noticed the match.
As you can see in the following figure, at the requirement/task/role level, there is no apparent match be-tween my client’s experience and the job requirements. It is only at the level of individual activities that the transferability of previous experience to the new job becomes visible. In order to recognise this match, he had to analyse his previous professional experience down to the level of individual activities. And in interviews with fund analysts, he also researched their job requirements down to the level of individual activities. Of course, his interviewing skills as a journalist were of use to him. He conducted the kind of job research I always recommend when people want to move into a new professional field.