Reimagine Your Creative Career Journey

II. You, Your Story, and Your Creative Career

Core Values, Traits, and Skills

Core Values, Traits, and Transferable Skills

We’ve now explored a bit about what you like, in terms of types of people and environments. Let’s look at you a bit further in terms of Transferable Skills that you will be bringing with you.

Who are you in terms of skills that you want to do and skills that companies want?

Transferable Skills are ones that you can take from one experience to the next. What about your own Transferable Skills that you will bring to your next few jobs

Do you know clearly what they are?
Does your resume communicate them well?
Do you know which ones you WANT to use vs. what you are good at?

We’ll keep this simple here, though this can be an area where you can richly dig into your own experiences and stories. We strongly recommend longer explorations of your skills with processes like What Color is Your Parachute. Other resources will be available on the list at the end of the program.

Companies that are hiring you are looking for what you can do with and for them. You, on the other hand, are wanting to do things that add value, that you enjoy, and that you can keep growing through doing. That may not always end up being a good match. So let’s start out figuring out what you can do that you also actually want to do in a career.

Please download the PDF that you’ll find at this link.

This Worksheet

This is a worksheet about Transferable Skills and is based in parts on lists from the NACE (The National Association of Colleges and Employers) on skills that employers have expressed they are seeking. You will find a LONG list of skills and attributes that are Transferable Skills included in the PDF. Some may be talents. Some may be ways that you work. Others may be learned skills. We tend to call the skills and subject matter expert areas “hard skills” and the people- and trait-based areas “soft skills.” Watch for both of these in the following exercise.

Exercise:

Take that same sheet, and check off everything that you CAN do fairly well. There is a LOT on this list, so don’t be surprised that you have odd groupings and big gaps. You also might want to use one color pen for this.
When you are done with this, take a look at it as if it is someone else’s list. Write down on a different piece of paper what this person seems to be like. What can they do well? What might an outsider think of your skillset?
Next, take a different color pen, or a highlighter, or circle the skills that you ENJOY doing and would like to have in what you’ll be doing in the future. These should be skills that you would be happy to use on a consistent basis.

Where do these lists overlap? Are there skills you would like to be good at, but aren’t yet or don’t have evidence of yet? Things you would like to learn or try? Things you never want to do again?

Hopefully, you can pick your top 10 that are on both lists, or mostly on both lists. Write them down one side of a piece of paper, and next to them write 1-2 things that you have done so far that would be EVIDENCE to support your transferrable skills with these areas.

The pictures on the rest of the printout will show ways that you might think about the experiences that you have had that can uncover or represent transferrable skills for your thoughts about your own choices, growth, and representations of your work.

Keep that list — we’re going to come back to it in a future section.

Optional — When you have time, I strongly suggest that you explore one of several books in this regard. The full list is at the end, but my favorite choice as noted above is this:

Bolles, “What Color is Your Parachute 2021” — Mr. Bolles passed away several years ago, but has been updating this series every year for 40 years. His son, Gary, along with other writers have moved this series forward with new material, andthe core exercises in this book are excellent to go through in much more detail. He also created a workbook that you can do with this program: “What Color is Your Parachute? Job-Hunter’s Workbook.”