2 You should always claim the highest skills you legitimately can, on the basis of your past performance.
As we see in the functional/transferable skills diagram above, your transferable skills break down into three families, according to whether you use them with Data/Information, People, or Things. And again, as this diagram makes clear, within each family there are simple skills, and there are higher, or more complex skills, so that these all can be diagrammed as inverted pyramids, with the simpler skills at the bottom, and the more complex ones in order above it.
Incidentally, as a general rule—to which there are exceptions—each higher skill requires you to be able also to do all those skills listed below it. So of course you can claim those, as well. But you want to especially claim the highest skill you legitimately can, on each pyramid, based on what you have already proven you can do, in the past.
3 The higher your transferable skills, the more freedom you will have on the job.
Simpler skills can be, and usually are, heavily prescribed (by the employer), so if you claim only the simpler skills, you will have to “fit in”— following the instructions of your supervisor, and doing exactly what you are told to do. The higher the skills you can legitimately claim, the more you will be given discretion to carve out the job the way you want to—so that it truly fits you.
4 The higher your transferable skills, the less competition you will face for whatever job you are seeking, because jobs that use such skills will rarely be advertised through normal channels.
Not for you the way of classified ads, resumes, and agencies, that we spoke of in earlier chapters. No, if you can legitimately claim higher skills, then to find such jobs you must follow the step- by-step process I am describing here.
The essence of this approach to job-hunting or career-change is that once you have identified your favorite transferable skills, and your favorite special knowledges, you may then approach any organization that interests you, whether they have a known vacancy or not. Naturally, whatever places you visit—and particularly those that have not advertised any vacancy—you will find far fewer job-hunters that you have to compete with.
In fact, if the employers you visit happen to like you well enough, they may be willing to create for you a job that does not presently exist. In which case, you will be competing with no one, since you will be the sole applicant for that newly created job. While this doesn’t happen all the time, it is astounding to me how many times it does happen. The reason it does is that the employers often have been thinking about creating a new job within their organization, for quite some time— but with this and that, they just have never gotten around to doing it. Until you walked in.
Then they decided they didn’t want to let you get away, since good employees are as hard to find as are good employers. And they suddenly remember that job they have been thinking about creating for many weeks or months, now. So they dust off their intention, create the job on the spot, and offer it to you! And if that new job is not only what they need, but is exactly what you were looking for, then you have a dream job. Match-match. Win- win.
From our country’s perspective, it is also interesting to note this: by this job-hunting initiative of yours, you have helped accelerate the creation of more jobs in your country, which is so much on everybody’s mind here in the new millennium. How nice to help your country, as well as yourself!
5 Don’t confuse transferable skills with traits.
Functional/transferable skills are often confused with traits, temperaments, or type.[42] People think transferable skills are such things as: has lots of energy, gives attention to details, gets along well with people, shows determination, works well under pressure, is sympathetic, intuitive, persistent, dynamic, dependable, etc. Despite popular misconceptions, these are not functional/transferable skills, but traits, or the style with which you do your transferable skills. For example, take “gives attention to details.” If one of your transferable skills is “conducting research” then “gives attention to details” describes the manner or style with which you do the transferable skill called conducting research. If you want to know what your traits are, popular tests such as the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator measure that sort of thing, as we just saw in chapter 12.
If you have access to the Internet, there are clues, at least, about your traits or “type”:
Working Out Your Myers-Briggs Type
www.teamtechnology.co.uk/mb-intro/mb-intro.htm
An informative article about the Myers-Briggs
The 16 Personality Types
www.personalitypage.com/high- level.html
A helpful site about Myers types
What Is Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type?
www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory .html
www.personalitypathways.com
Another article about personality types; also, there’s a Myers-Briggs
Applications page, with links to test resources
Myers-Briggs Foundation home page
www.myersbriggs.org
The official website of the Foundation; lots of testing resources
Human Metrics Test (Jung Typology)
www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp
Free test, loosely based on the Myers-Briggs
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Online
www.discoveryourpersonality.com/MBTI.html
On this site you can find the official Myers-Briggs test, $60
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter
http://keirsey.com
Free test, similar to the Myers-Briggs
“I Wouldn’t Recognize My Skills If They Came Up and Shook Hands with Me” Now that you know what transferable skills technically are, the problem that awaits you now, is figuring
