 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. Hi, my name is Raph. Welcome to Riza, 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're 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, building relationships with customers, 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, you've got technical writing, marketing, languages, et cetera. 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, et cetera. 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've put these into these four categories, into these four buckets, they're not mutually exclusive. They do cross over 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 wanna explore short, medium and long term. The second step is to start making some choices. What you wanna start immediately focusing on that's gonna get you to places in the short term, in the medium term and in the long term. So you wanna 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 gonna be on the top transferable skills for 2021. And as a bit of a teaser, it's gonna 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.