The Mentor Mesh tech community delivered the value-packed Mentor Mesh Experience (MMX) in Seattle, Washington, from June 30 through July 1, 2023. Juliana J. Bolden served as a featured speaker during the two-day, in-person/hybrid conference, delivering the interactive session, Build Your Confidence with Transferable Skills.
Resources and How-to Steps for Attendees
Designed to help attendees to assess and map their skills to their next opportunities, the MMX session included the following slides and actionable steps:
Download slides here:
Build Your Confidence With Transferable Work Skills (PDF)
See guide excerpt (plus full link below), covering how to assess your own transferable skills:
Full Article: Steps to Identifying Your Transferable Skills (Webpage)
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.