You don’t have to reinvent yourself, but…
➔ While your experience may be your greatest asset, a major hurdle confronting many older job seekers is how to transfer your hard-earned experience from one job or one industry to another. It may take a little digging, but almost all of us have transferable skills – those that apply across job functions, across lines of business.
If you’re thinking that you can’t apply any skills from your old job to something else, think again. Rather than looking at your specific job or task, maybe you should take a step back and analyze what exactly you were doing.
Here are a few “transferable” skills
Communication. In addition to your ability to convey ideas and directions to fellow employees, being a good listener is just as valuable, just as important and just as applicable to a new post.
A close cousin of communication is your ability to handle customer complaints and a desire to serve customers. Customer service, by the way, goes far beyond sitting by a phone fielding customer complaints.
Flexibility and dependability are two traits that are prized by employers regardless of the type of business they’re in.
Your ability to trouble shoot and diagnose a problem as well as being resourceful enough to recognize the right solution(s) and being able to implement problem solving efficiently and effectively cuts across industry lines.
Another skill that is highly sought after by today’s employers – and one that tends to be prevalent among mature workers is reliability. When an employer can trust an employee to get the job done right, the first time is a highly valued commodity – that isn’t always all that common.
If you’re moving into unfamiliar territory, the ability to interpret a situation and adapt to it make any training you may require shorter and more likely to “stick” with you – a real asset to any job.
In this short space, we’ve identified no less than a dozen transferable skills that can be applied across the board. Before you jump to any conclusions about not having the skills to survive in today’s competitive job market, take a harder look at what you’ve done, what you’re good at and you may see a whole new you.
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