Primary skills

Often, when people want to change jobs, one of the main difficulties they face involves feeling stuck in the same position because it’s all they’ve ever done. And while this may be true in some instances, it’s not true that they don’t have any skills that could be used in other positions — transferable skills in other words. Remember that whenever you go to a new workplace or company, you have to learn the details of the new position. And even though the details of the job or the industry may be different, the fundamental skills are often the same. The problem many people have with this approach is that they fail to distinguish between professions and other career paths. Professions have set qualifications and career paths (e.g., teacher, doctor, dentist, architect), while other jobs have less defined qualifications and experience but can still have good career paths. Professions are good for people who want to predict their future as much as possible. But there’s a downside - professions can be risky if they slowly or suddenly start to disappear. This could be due to a number of factors from outsourcing and automation to changes in customer behaviour and market trends. That’s why I encourage people to understand their transferable skills so that even if their industry changes, they will still know how to change jobs, careers and industries.

Primary skills

So what do you do? Or rather, how do you describe what you do? Many of us tend to talk about our industry or describe our role in industry-specific terms which are unfamiliar to others. The problem is that other people may not delve deeper and ask us questions, meaning they won't know what we do, resulting in us missing out on potential opportunities. So how you can explain your current job so that anyone can understand, regardless of the industry? This is the common denominator, the intersection of the Venn diagram, the common ground. The answer is to outline your role's primary skills — they act as a common ground because they exist in almost all industries and organisations. Think of these as the easiest and most basic ways to explain your job. In other words, what does your job involve on a weekly basis? For example administration, customer service and sales. If people ask me what my work involves, I tell them: coaching, mentoring and business development. Coaching and mentoring refer to my work with clients, and business development is a nice catch-all to explain everything else, from updating the website and creating products/services to making videos and doing media interviews.

Remember to distinguish the content from the process — the content changes but the process stays the same. For example, if you know how to cook rice, you also know how to cook pasta because you understand the process of cooking food in boiling water. Or, if you understand how to coordinate workshops for one industry, you should be able to coordinate workshops for another industry — because the process is the same.

Examples of primary skills are: 

customer service • administration • coordination • operations • bookkeeping • sales • relationship-building • managing staff • business development • project management • product management • leadership • design • stakeholder engagement • event management • data analytics • financial management • marketing • public relations • communications • coaching and mentoring • training and facilitation • merchandising and promotions • research and analysis • software development • data analysis 

EXERCISE: Outline all of your primary skills and then highlight your top 3 Review the list above and outline all of your primary skills. Then, highlight your top three primary skills. That way, you’ll be able to explain what you do in a simple way.