Transferable skills - improve your technical, conceptual, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills

i built a whole career around transferable skills they've allowed me to move across roles and industries get promoted and have the flexibility and freedom to control and direct where i wanted to go today we're going to talk about what transferable skills are why they're important and we're going to get you started using them to accelerate your career and we're going to do it all right now [Music] hi my name is raf welcome to riser where my mission is to help you go further faster in your career so i started my career as a storeman and

packer i was lifting boxes of flatbed trucks i was packing customer orders and a lot of it was really labor-intensive one of the upsides of being in a small business is that you do get a chance to do a bit of everything because you have to all pile in when required to keep the thing running so i did learn a lot of different functions while i was with that business as the business continued to grow so did the needs for example there was a need to do lots of promotion we were doing lots and lots

of promotion so i went out and bought a marketing textbook and at nights when i was home from the office i would read about things like segmentation targeting and positioning and i would try different things at work and i kept kind of doing that and learning and applying as i went along so i learned marketing that way and branding new product introductions and industrial design i got involved in design and development of those products business development so after a number of years in that business my brother actually noticed an advert in the newspaper for a

very large multinational conglomerate with a really really high brand profile one of those sorts of companies that kind of everyone wants to work for and he said hey you should apply for this job there were about a dozen requirements went down the list marketing uh building relationships with customers uh financial accounting manufacturing processes customizing product went for the role i threw my hat in the ring and i got the role that unique mix of skills and experience got me the role no doubt about it for me it was an absolutely life-changing event i can't underestimate

that it was life-changing not just in terms of the remuneration but in terms of the opportunity that came with it as well and i came to realize that it was that mix of skills that i had at that exact time plus the proof that i could do it which allowed me to demonstrate that i actually had the value that i could deliver to the company that got me the job and allowed me to be successful in the job so what i think makes transferable skills so powerful is that they do two things simultaneously firstly they

increase your value they improve your value and secondly they decrease your competition as well because of course there's fewer people that have your unique mix of skills and experience as you amass them and so those two things together have this exponential effect on your opportunity now let's talk a little bit about what transferable skills actually are and in doing some research for this particular episode i noticed that a lot of people out there are referring to different skills as being either soft skills or hard skills and i just don't believe in that approach at all

i don't believe that soft skills are soft in any way shape or form if you listen to simon sinek talk about it i completely agree with what he says there's nothing soft about those skills and i also feel exactly the same about hard skills there's nothing hard about them instead i found it was much more logical for me to put them into four buckets now the first of these are technical skills these are skills where you can gain a certain proficiency and they can often be measured they're often the sorts of things that have methods

and processes and procedures such as typing computer literacy office skills reporting data and analytics coding or programming project management the list goes on technical writing marketing languages etc now this isn't a complete list by any stretch of the imagination i've just put 10 of these in each of these buckets so you can get an idea of what we're talking about here so hopefully that makes sense so those are your technical transferable skills next are your conceptual transferable skills these are really formed around ideas and concepts and tend to be more strategic these are things like

decision making critical thinking strategy abstract reasoning problem solving adaptability things that have more breadth ideation innovation vision and mission etc so you'll often find that these are the sorts of skills in more senior roles in more leadership type positions next are your interpersonal skills these are the relationships we have between yourself and others things like communication teamwork negotiation influence empathy delegation conflict resolution motivation coaching and mentoring and leadership and the fourth category is intrapersonal not to be confused with interpersonal intrapersonal means within yourself these are to do with your own thoughts and feelings this has

to do with your why your reason for getting up in the morning your self-esteem your self-confidence reflection open-mindedness motivation emotional awareness mindfulness your values such as your morals and beliefs and resilience so each of these skills that you can see here can be on a spectrum from generalist to specialist and you can also operate at different levels of proficiency on them as well also important to note that whilst i put these into these four categories into these four buckets they're not mutually exclusive they do crossover from one bucket to the next so i've demonstrated this

through this venn diagram and they could have more or less crossover depending on the skills that you're looking at the situation that you're in so hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of what the different transferable skills are now as promised we're going to get you started on improving your transferable skills in three easy steps really so the first step is to assess your own transferable skills and believe it or not we all have transferable skills whether you're in an entry level position and you're typing at a certain words per minute or you're doing

marketing like i was and you have certain skill sets within that whatever it is make a list of your transferable skills using this framework as a guide whilst you can use the list that i have as a starting point i urge you to do your own research you want to be asking yourself what degree of expertise or experience do you have on each of these are you a beginner are you at an intermediate level are you advanced are you an expert and how do these skills that you have align with your aspirations what you want

to do in the future and so you're starting to hopefully now identify some transferable skills that you need that aren't on your list that you want in the future so you should be able to come up with a list of skills that you want to explore short medium and long term the second step is to start making some choices what you want to start immediately focusing on that's going to get you to places in the short term in the medium term and in the long term so you want to be selecting just a few of

those skills that you've written down one way of doing this is using an impact effort matrix and i'll drop a link below if you're interested in watching that episode make sure you're dipping into each of those four buckets as well that i mentioned and not just leaving one or two completely behind for example if you're only focusing on your technical skills and you've got nothing there of a conceptual nature then you can't really be expecting these to help you with roles that require more conceptual ability in the future step three is to set yourself a

goal what are you actually going to do make sure you have a plan to achieve these things as well because a goal without a plan is just a wish the next episode is going to be on the top transferable skills for 2021 and as a bit of a teaser it's going to be a reaction video on what's generally put out there because i don't fully agree with a lot of what's put out there and there's some things that you should certainly be aware of and look out for don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification

bell so that you don't miss any of this content if you have any questions or observations do let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed this hit the thumbs up button it really does help with the youtube algorithm and don't forget to share it with a friend or a colleague till next time keep rising you