Transferable skills

What counts as a transferable skill

Almost any skill can transfer if the new job uses it. For the non-technical side, a useful reference is the Australian Government's Core Skills for Work Developmental Framework, which describes the skills often called employability or generic skills. It sets out ten skill areas in three groups: navigating the world of work, interacting with others, and getting the work done. Those areas include communicating for work, connecting and working with others, planning and organising, making decisions, identifying and solving problems, creating and innovating, and working in a digital world.

Technical skills transfer too, just to fewer places. A chef who manages food costs and ordering has budgeting experience that a catering or cafe management role can use. Someone who has run a CRM system in a contact centre may find a different product in a sales or office role, but the way of recording and following up customer contact will be familiar.

The framework treats work broadly, including self-employment and volunteering as well as paid jobs. So a skill you built running a sporting club's accounts or organising a school fundraiser counts, as long as you can describe what you did.

Why common skills rarely carry a career move on their own

General skills appear in nearly every job. Of the 350 occupations profiled on careertips, problem solving is listed as a general skill for 299, written communication for 253 and attention to detail for 230. They transfer easily because almost every employer needs them. That also means most other applicants can say they have them too, so on their own they rarely explain why you suit one particular role over another.

A move is more likely to be short when specialist skills overlap as well, which is why the career moves listed on each careertips occupation page give a shared specialist skill three times the weight of a shared general one. An administration officer and an executive assistant share scheduling, document work and stakeholder contact along with some data analysis, and the move is rated as needing minimal retraining. A customer service officer and a flight attendant share five general skills, including customer service, problem solving and empathy, but the flight attendant role adds emergency response, and the move is rated as needing a short course.

Transferable skills also can't stand in for a qualification or registration that a job legally or practically requires. An aged care worker shares much of the day-to-day patient care work of a registered nurse, yet becoming one still means a nursing degree and registration. The guide on how to change careers explains these retraining levels in more detail and shows how to check the moves open from your own occupation.

How to find your own transferable skills

Job titles hide a lot of what people do, so it helps to start from the work itself.

• List the tasks that fill a typical week. Include the parts nobody would put in a job ad, such as sorting out the roster, answering the same questions from every new starter or reconciling the till at close.
• Name the skill behind each task. Rostering is planning and organising. Helping new starters is training others. Reconciling the till is handling money accurately and noticing when a figure doesn't add up.
• Add evidence from outside your job. Volunteering, study, caring responsibilities, a committee role or a small business on the side can all show skills your job didn't give you room to use. The framework itself notes that how well someone can demonstrate a skill depends on context, including how much autonomy their role allows. If your job never let you make decisions, a club treasurer role might have.
• Compare your list with the job you want. Read three or four ads for the target role, along with its occupation page on careertips, and mark the skills that come up repeatedly. The ones on both lists are the transferable skills to lead with for that move. The ones that appear only in the ads are your gaps, which you may be able to close with training or explain in your application.

If you don't have a target role in mind yet, Workforce Australia's Job Switch tool asks for a previous job title and location, then suggests jobs with similar skills, along with training options and current vacancies. The careertips career quiz takes a different approach, starting from how you like to work and returning a shortlist of Australian roles.

Describing your skills in the new field's language

Every industry has its own words for the same work. A teacher might talk about differentiating a lesson, while a workplace trainer would call that tailoring content to different audiences. A hospitality supervisor runs the floor on a busy night, and an operations job ad might describe the same thing as coordinating staff and resources during peak demand. Someone reading your application may not recognise the terms from your old field, so it helps to describe each skill in the words the target job ad uses, as long as the description is accurate.

For example, a retail worker applying for an administration role could translate their experience like this.

The work in the left column stays the same. Only the wording changes, so the person reading the application can see the match without having to work it out.

Showing transferable skills in an application

Employers tend to look for different things at each stage. Jobs and Skills Australia surveyed 499 recruiting employers in 2022 and published the results in 2024 as How employers recruit. At the application stage, half said they looked for evidence of relevant experience and skills, and 28% looked for the right qualifications and licences. At interview, the most commonly cited quality was the applicant's approach or attitude to work (49%), followed by cultural fit (43%). For a career changer, that means the written application needs to make the overlap easy to see, and the interview is where you can explain the move and how you work.

On your resume, a short summary at the top can name the direction you're heading and the two or three skills that carry across. Under each previous role, put the tasks most relevant to the new job first, even if they weren't the main part of that job. The guide to skills to put on your resume covers how to back up each skill with a specific line in your work history.

A cover letter is the natural place to connect your background to the new role, because an employer reading a resume from a different field may not make that connection themselves. One or two short examples showing a skill in action usually do more than a list. If you're unsure whether to include one, do you need a cover letter looks at when it's worth writing.

In an interview, prepare one example for each transferable skill the ad asks for and describe it without the jargon of your old industry. You may also be asked why you're changing direction. The guide to answering tell me about yourself has a section for career changers, and how to prepare for a job interview explains how to turn the job ad into a set of examples.

If the ad names a system or task you haven't done, it's fine to say so and point to the closest thing you have done. That might be a similar software package you learned on the job, along with how long it took you to become confident using it.