Everyone says they have transferable skills and to be fair everyone does, the problem is that most people describe them in ways so vague that they become invisible.
"Good communicator." "Team player." "Strong organisational skills."
These phrases appear on approximately 94% of all CVs (rough estimate but very likely true!). They don't make you memorable, they don't make you credible and they certainly don't convince a hiring manager that you can do a job you've never officially done before.
If you're changing careers, returning after a break, or trying to move sideways into something new, the ability to identify and articulate your real transferable skills isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole thing.
Here's how to actually do it.
Why vague skills claims fall flat
Hiring managers aren't sceptical because they're difficult, they're sceptical because they've been caught out before. They've interviewed people who said all the right things but couldn't follow through. So when they read "excellent communicator" on a CV, the internal response is: sure, but what does that mean and can you prove it?
Transferable skills only carry weight when they're specific and evidenced. "I managed stakeholder communication" is a claim. "I wrote a weekly briefing for 40 parents translating complex SEND policy changes into plain English, which reduced complaint calls by a third" is a skill with a story attached.
The exercise: mine your experience properly
Get a piece of paper, open a notes app, whatever works. You're going to go through your experience (paid, unpaid, voluntary, caring, self-employed, side projects, all of it) and answer three questions for each role or responsibility:
1. What did I actually do, in concrete terms? Not your job title or a summary of your duties. The specific tasks, decisions, and actions you took. "Managed the rota" becomes "rebuilt the staff rota system for 22 people across three sites after the old one kept resulting in gaps."
2. What problem was I solving, or what result did it produce? This is where the value lives. Numbers help if you have them. But even qualitative outcomes matter: the situation improved, people felt better supported, the process became faster, the team stopped being stretched because they were short-staffed.
3. What did doing that actually require of me? This is the skill extraction step. If you rebuilt that rota you needed to understand competing priorities, negotiate with people who all had different constraints on their time, manage a system under time pressure and probably communicate clearly when someone wasn't going to get what they wanted. That's not just "organisation" that's negotiation, systems thinking, and conflict-sensitive communication.
Do this for five to ten examples from your life. Don't filter too hard at this stage,things that feel ordinary to you often look impressive from the outside.
Categorising what you find
Once you've got your raw material, start grouping it. You're looking for patterns across different contexts because that's exactly what a transferable skill is: a capability that shows up repeatedly, in different settings, with consistent results.
Some useful categories to sort against:
- Analysis and problem-solving: breaking down complexity, making decisions with incomplete information, spotting patterns
- Communication: written, verbal, presenting to different audiences, translating technical concepts
- Leadership and influence: getting people on board, managing without authority, mentoring, driving change
- Planning and delivery: project management, prioritisation under pressure, coordinating multiple moving parts
- Relationship-building: client management, stakeholder engagement, community work, customer service
- Learning and adaptation: picking up new systems quickly, thriving in ambiguity, changing tack when things shift
You're not trying to wedge every experience into a category, you're looking for where your strongest evidence clusters.
How to articulate them in applications
Once you know what your transferable skills actually are the job is translating them into the language of the role you're going for.
This means reading job descriptions carefully and matching your evidence to their priorities. If a role emphasises stakeholder management, lead with the story that demonstrates exactly that. If it prioritises analytical thinking, find your clearest example of working through a complex problem.
When writing your CV, weave skills into your experience section as demonstrated facts rather than claimed attributes. The personal statement or profile at the top is also a good place to make the connection explicit: "After ten years in secondary education, I'm moving into learning and development, bringing direct experience in curriculum design, adult communication, and managing the competing needs of large, diverse groups under regulatory pressure."
That's a career changer who sounds prepared, not apologetic.
If you're also working on your cover letter, the structure of your letter matters as much as the content. The perfect cover letter structure (with a template you can actually use) walks through exactly how to frame a skills-based argument without it sounding like a list.
For a broader look at making the move without having to start at the bottom, how to change careers without starting from scratch covers the strategic side of positioning yourself across industries.
In interviews: telling the skill story
Most competency-based interview questions are essentially asking: "Can you show me, through a real example, that you have this skill?"
The STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) exists for good reason. It gives your answer a shape but the bit most people rush or skip is the reflection at the end: what did this experience tell you about how you work? That reflection is where transferable skills become visible as genuine self-awareness not just a list of things that happened to you.
Practise out loud. It feels odd but it works. You'll find out quickly which stories land and which ones trail off into "and yeah, it kind of worked out in the end."
A note for returners
If you've had a career break, for caring, health, redundancy, or anything else, the instinct is often to minimise or apologise for the gap. Don't.
The skills gap narrative is often vastly overstated. Many people returning from a break have developed capabilities their employed peers haven't: managing sustained uncertainty, making high-stakes decisions with limited resources, negotiating complex systems on behalf of others. These are real and they belong in your applications. The key is translating them into professional language without sounding like you're overselling a CV gap. Specificity is your friend here too. "I managed full-time care for a parent with dementia for two years, including coordinating NHS and social care provision, managing financial and legal matters and making complex decisions under significant emotional pressure" is not a gap, it's experience.
When it comes to making sure your CV is also being read by the right systems before it reaches a human, ATS-proof your CV: what recruiters' software is really looking for is worth a read alongside this exercise.
And if you're working on your CV profile or summary, how to write a personal statement that actually gets read is a good companion piece for turning your skills audit into a strong opening.
The real work here
Identifying transferable skills properly is uncomfortable for a lot of people because it requires you to take your own experience seriously. There's a tendency, especially amongst career changers and returners, to assume that what you've done "doesn't count" in a new context.
It almost always does. The work is in finding the right words for it, and trusting that specificity, not confidence, is what makes someone believe you.
Sources
- CIPD (2024). Skills-based hiring: employer perspectives on competency and transferable skills. https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/reports/skills-based-hiring/
- ONS (2023). Labour market overview, UK: skills and employment transitions. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes
- GOV.UK / Department for Education (2023). Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skills-for-jobs-lifelong-learning-for-opportunity-and-growth
- Chartered Management Institute (2023). Management and leadership skills: the transferability gap. https://www.managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/research/
- TUC (2023). Career breaks and return to work: barriers and enablers for UK workers. https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports