How to Uncover Your Transferable Skills

When you decide that you are ready to make a change mid-career, it can be hard to figure out which skills apply in your new industry (aka are transferable) and which skills you need to put on the back burner. To help with that question, here’s my primer on transferable skills.

Let’s say you are a patent attorney and have been in the industry for 10 + years.  You know your stuff, but the career itself isn’t what you thought it would be. You’re ready to move on to a new industry and found this mid-level, marketing executive position that really floats your boat.

You want to apply, but as you start to compare your qualifications with the job requirements, you get discouraged. Ten years of experience as a patent attorney has qualified you to:

• Provide legal advice related to invention evaluation,
• Prepare and prosecute domestic and foreign patent applications,
• Review, draft and negotiate licensing agreements and IP related government contracts,
• Prepare and register copyright,
• Draft non-disclosure agreements, and
• Provide licensed, legal representation before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

You know that these skills sound great to any employer looking for a patent attorney, but in the marketing world, you doubt they mean much. So you think to yourself, “with 10 + years of professional experience, surely I have some transferable skills.”

It’s just that when you sit down to update your resume, you can’t seem to figure what those skills are or how to highlight them. If you’re at that point or somewhere near there, here’s what you need to know to uncover your transferable skills.

Defining Transferable Skills

Transferable skills are a core set of hard skills that you can apply to a wide range of jobs and industries.  That sounds easy enough to comprehend. The problem is that there is a lot of misunderstanding about hard skills and soft skills that make identifying your transferable hard skills more difficult. So before we discuss how to uncover your transferable skills, let’s take a step back and get a deeper understanding of hard skills and soft skills.

Hard Skills

Hard skills are teachable skills and abilities that are easy to quantify. For example, every skill mention in the patent attorney example above is a hard skill.  You can quantify how many patent clients you’ve advised and how many licensing agreements you’ve drafted. Additionally, to perform those tasks, you had to get some education and training.    

Soft Skills

Soft skills are subjective skills that are difficult to quantify. They are the interpersonal skills that tell an employer how you relate to others in the workplace (i.e., team player). They also tell an employer about your working style and emotional intelligence (i.e., highly organized project manager with the ability to anticipate the needs of her team).

Soft skills are essential for building teams, getting work done, and relating to others at work. However, because they are difficult to quantify, they are hard for an employer to verify in the hiring process. For the most part, an employer won’t really know how “highly organized” you are until they see your working style in action. So only listing soft skills on your resume as your transferable skills is a sure way not to get a call back for an interview.

How to Identify Your Transferable Hard Skills

The key to making a transition from patent attorney to a marketing executive, or any other industry outside the law for that matter, is to identify and quantify your transferable hard skills. You do that by breaking down your industry-specific skills into their components.

Within any industry-specific skill, there are subskills that you had to learn to perform those tasks effectively.  These subskills are usually where your transferable skills lie.

For example, to perform the industry-specific skill of “drafting nondisclosure agreements,” a patent attorney would need to learn how to: research, write, edit, and analyze.  These subskills are transferable because researching, writing, editing and analyzing are tasks that professionals perform in virtually all industries. They are also quantifiable because you can measure the impact of these activities on your organization or customers.

When it comes to attorneys, some common transferable skills are writing, editing, training, presenting, public speaking, research, analytics, business strategy, management, project management, and leadership development.  By highlighting subskills like these on your resume, a patent attorney can become a marketer, and you can shift into any industry you desire.

Do you know your transferable skills?  Tell me about them in the comment below.  I love to hear your thoughts and comments.