Claire Farrugia
Operations Executive, gradireland
When job hunting, assess your strengths, skills and aptitudes. Match these to the job description, emphasising relevant skills in your curriculum vitae (CV) for better alignment.
When writing a CV, transferrable skills often go overlooked. These skills are usually highly sought after by recruiters and can be difficult to demonstrate.
What are transferable skills?
Transferable skills are the skills you have developed through your life experiences — not just in jobs — which will be of value in the workplace. This experience could come from projects, work placements, voluntary work, sport, personal life, hobbies and interests. These experiences will have given you opportunities to work with others, take a leadership role or show that you can be committed and conscientious, for example.
Key skills that are worth mentioning include self-reliance skills, interpersonal skills (such as communication), teamwork and leadership and employability skills that can be used in a broad range of situations (such as problem-solving, creativity and time management).
The best place to start
is the job description.
Highlighting the right skills
The best place to start is the job description. Look over the description for the role you’re interested in and take note of keywords and job requirements. These will help you tease out the skills the recruiter is looking for and build a list of core skills to refer to.
For example, if the job you’re applying to requires you to work on several projects at once, you should emphasise your time management skills. Communication skills and problem-solving skills are also likely to be useful in this type of role, especially if you’re likely to be dealing with multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests.
Examples of relevant skills
You’ll then need to figure out which of the core skills for the role you can demonstrate. Here, you can draw on previous projects you have worked on, even if the experience is from a different field or a voluntary role. The point is to highlight skills you have gained that will be useful in this job. Add examples of how you have employed these skills in the past to your CV. Describe projects or tasks that you have worked on and how your skills helped you achieve the desired results.
