Can I transfer my current skills to an alte ative career?

When someone decides to leave their job and go and do something completely different with their career, a hugely important question can be flying around in their head. That question is will they be able to use their current qualifications when they’ve changed their career? This is a reasonable question to ask; after all if you have been trained as a marketing assistant it may be difficult to transfer your career to an IT support engineer.

However, if you have made the brave decision to leave your current career behind you because you don’t like it anymore or you’re not challenged, then you should feel assured that you will have a lot to offer any employer, no matter what sector you choose to move to. A lot of the time, employers will look at the amount of experience you have, even if it’s not relevant experience, as this can show a range of quality attributes that are attractive to employers.

From your length of time spent at your previous company, new employers can see loyalty, trustworthiness and the willingness to build a career. Your experience will therefore mitigate any lack of skills that you might have. In a lot of cases, if you have really made an impression on an employer, either through your CV or through an interview, then they will want you even without relevant skills and offer to assist you in up skilling.

Even before leaving your old career behind you, you can start retraining, through attending evening classes or perhaps enrolling onto online courses, where it’s possible to study from home and fit it in around your day to day life. Even if you have started a brand new career and find that it is a lot harder than you thought and you feel you could do with some more qualifications or skills, then you can look exte
ally for help and you may even find that your new company can help you fund this.

You can certainly be assured that whilst you may not have all of the specific skills for a brand new career, you will definitely have many, many transferrable skills that you can use and that will be attractive to a new employer. Just because you may have left school years ago, it does not mean that you cannot learn new things if needed. On the flip side, you should not start spending tons of money on qualifications that you may not need, you should do proper research into your new chosen career and make a list of why you think you can do it and you’ll be sure to find you’ve got plenty of skills to transfer.