How to Elevate Your Transferable Skills When Considering a Career Change

Belinda stood in front of the BMW UK sign

We may all joke, but the job market sometimes feels as though hiring managers want 30 years+ experience for graduate level jobs. And, whilst I often say these things in jest, there are some examples I have seen where assistant roles are almost expected to have enough experience to run a company on a salary best described as tickling minimum wage.

Fortunately, these scenarios are few and far between. But, even so, the job market can feel daunting, particularly when you are doing a complete 180 degrees in your career. As I identified in an earlier blog, I made the transition from classroom to product marketing after discovering that teaching was not for me. However, 23-year old me had no idea what transferable skills were or how I could link my experiences in a classroom to any job I applied for.

You could effectively say I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best when I submitted my applications. Of course, there's a reason I applied for hundreds of roles and only had the opportunity to interview for a handful. Truthfully, I didn't know how to articulate my skillset. Yet, I somehow managed to break into a job in the automotive sector and proceed to thrive,

So, if you are planning a career change, whether it's teaching to marketing - like me - or forestry to management, here are some thoughts you can consider for your applications.

Understanding your transferable skills

Before you can fully attack the application process, you need to know what you are working with. Once you understand these, you can attribute hard and soft skills, which can then be linked to the new area or industry you are considering moving to. This is some of the advice I wish I had before my career change.

Here's a break down of you can do it:

1. Write down your core responsibilities

To make a head start with your applications, it's first important to identify the core responsibilities of your current role. You should already be including a snapshot on your CV anyway, so you can use these to start. However, it might also be worth adding secondary or shared responsibilities too, this way you can document everything you are working with.

As a teacher, some of my responsibilities looked like:

• Ensuring a safe and inclusive learning environment that enabled students to thrive

  
  

• Ensuring accurate and informed teaching of the national curriculum, providing differentiated content that enabled a range of learners to engage

  
  

• Ensuring a high-level understanding and application of the English language, setting an example for all learners

Of course, there were many others, but I'll keep it simple for the purpose of this blog. I don't think there's any harm in having 10-12 responsibilities on your list, you'll just need to be confident you can evidence your experience with real-world examples.

2. Attribute your core responsibilities to hard and soft skills

Hard and soft skills are always measured when you apply for something new. And, they are particularly scrutinised and reviewed when you undergo a career change.

I'll just cover off what hard and soft skills are before we get into this one:

Hard skills: These are typically skills attributed to your job, such as technical skills or knowledge. Some examples of hard skills might include software proficiency, graphic design or copywriting.

Soft skills: These are typically more personal and interpersonal skills you might possess that measure how you interact and communicate with others. Some examples of soft skills include communication, adaptability and problem-solving skills.

So, considering I moved to the automotive industry after my teaching career, I would have had to evidence my hard and soft skills as part of the process. Taking my examples above, let's attribute these to some soft and hard skills:

Core responsibility	Hard skills	Soft skills
Ensuring a safe and inclusive learning environment that enabled students to thrive	Teaching Content differentiation Content and learning assessment	Behaviour management Adaptability Social awareness
Ensuring accurate and informed teaching of the national curriculum, providing differentiated content that enabled a range of learners to engage	Knowledge retention Content differentiation Teaching Progress assessment	Social awareness Behavioural awareness Relationship building
Ensuring a high-level understanding and application of the English language, setting an example for all learners	Subject-matter expert Confident written and spoken skills Progress assessment	Communication Social awareness

For each of these responsibilities, you'll see I have tried to add at least two soft and hard skills that can be attributed. Some of these may not immediately make sense to you from my example, which is fine - it's another part of the task to explain these.

So, let me give you reference:

Ensuring a safe and inclusive learning environment

• Hard skill: Content differentiation

  • To ensure full inclusivity in the classroom, teachers must provide differentiated lesson content to support a range of learners including those with difficulty reading to those considered gifted and talented.

• Soft skill: Behaviour management

  • To ensure a safe classroom environment, all behaviour has to be managed and dealt with accordingly, this includes positive and negative behaviours.

3. Look at the roles and/or industries you are applying for

Hopefully, you will have some idea of the new opportunity you are looking for. But, if you don't, you can try tools like the Skills Assessment created by the National Careers Service in the UK - or similar based on your country of residence.

Once you have an idea of where you might thrive, you can search for some jobs using keywords on online career noticeboards. It's up to you to determine what's right, but let's say you find a handful that look interesting and that might help fill your cup.

Each job advert should include a list of responsibilities alongside a list of necessary and desirable skills the company wishes you to possess. Doing a similar exercise to the above, write these down and map them to a hard and soft skill. You might notice there are some skills you don't have or that aren't strong, that's okay. In fact, it can give you some leverage in interviews.

To help you visualise this, I'll outline three core responsibilities I had when I started as a Product Communications Team Assistant. For context, I had had a full year as a qualified teacher with a training year prior to that. And, before this point, I was studying at university with numerous part time jobs from the age of 16. So, there were plenty of things I could talk on and leverage.

Core responsibility	Hard skills	Soft skills
Manage content for digital brochures, online configurator texts, and price lists, including imagery and text, liaising with agency partners and key stakeholders.	Content differentiation Project management Content creation	Communication Relationship building Adaptability
Lead ideation sessions, reviewing data and performance to understand the customer journey further and adapt materials.	KPI reporting and analysis Content differentiation Content development	Adaptability Communication
Maintain strong product knowledge and liaise with stakeholders to manage deadlines and client expectations.	Subject specialism Project management	Communication Expectation management

4. Compare your hard and soft skills against each other

So, from my examples above, you can see a range of different and similar skills have been mapped. Of course, as we look at changing careers into something new, we should not expect to see completely identical skills, there may also be some skills we don't currently possess. However, you might be able to draw some similarities between them.

Let's take an example of two hard skills I have mapped that are not the same, but similar:

Teaching: classroom management	Marketing: project management
Ensuring safety within a classroom as well as an inclusive learning environment	Ensuring there are key deliverables as part of a project, with all deliverables able to be facilitated
Ensuring all students are progressing and learning in a productive space.	Ensuring projects have clear metrics to measure against, ensuring progress is tracked and changes are accounted for
Ensuring the physical management of a classroom, such as design, layout and seating.	Ensuring clear communication and accountability for the success and learnings of a project

Now, for the teachers reading this, it's super obvious how these might map. But, for those without classroom experience, it won't be as clear.

Explaining my example:

Although I hate to use this as an example, the deliverables for teachers are considered a student's progress - meaning in any classroom at any one time they are possibly managing 30+ children with a range of differing needs. So, managing one or multiple projects is actually a breeze for ex-teachers.

Similarly, a teacher's salary increase or progression can also be determined by the average progress of their students, meaning data, analysis and performance is always tracked and measured.

And finally, the physical classroom needs to be managed every hour of the day, revised to ensure a productive learning environment and kept safe - this heavily links to accountability, ensuring that all key stakeholders (students, parents and other teachers) are kept updated on progress and learnings are used for improvement.

So, what if you are missing hard and soft skills?

To some extent, companies and roles can be accommodating if you miss a small number of these and may offer on-the-job training to help build up these skills. And, unless you have already had a pretty rich career with a tonne of development opportunities, you probably don't have every skill nailed.

Often owning up to some of the missing skills can show honesty and drive - you don't possess these but you are willing to learn. However, as I mentioned in the last blog, you can also be proactive and work on those skills to make up for any deficit you feel you have.

Soft skills are a really valuable skillset to possess, but these take some time to nurture and practice. However, hard skills can be easier to measure. You can find training courses and webinars online to help you build awareness on this, which was something I actually did with SEO - not just to help me write this blog but to progress my broader marketing awareness and work as an SEO copywriter.

Lastly, you can also try leaning on your loved ones to help you validate some of the skills you have and whether there are roles out there that are right for you.

Belinda Automotive

Want to know more about how I went from teaching to automotive?

As someone who is almost eight years into her career change, I talk about some of the trials and successes I have achieved. But, I also keep it very real and emphasis that change like this won't happen over night. You can follow me on LinkedIn to watch my journey progress.