Ease Your Entrance into the Field of Education by Highlighting Your Transferable Skills

The biggest challenge when entering a career in education is how to properly prepare and create a compelling resume. It may seem like a daunting task trying to enter the education field from another industry because of your lack of related experience. The solution to this is to highlight your transferable skills as a means of showcasing what you can do in the field of education.

Transferable skills can be broken into three different groups, specifically people, data, and equipment. The category for people refers to your skills in communicating, teaching, supervising, and coaching while the data category concerns record keeping, translating and evaluating data, researching, and compiling records. The category for equipment is about your skills in operating computers and other industry related equipment which also includes repair and assembly.

If you take the time to identify your transferable skills and evaluate your personal proficiencies in regards to these skills, you can convey to possible employers that you have the core skills necessary to excel in your new teaching career. Highlighting your transferable skills can help demonstrate that you are indeed qualified for the job position you are vying for.

If you showcase these skills in your resume, it can help the reader easily identify what they are looking for before they preoccupy themselves with reading the entire contents of the document. The highlights of your transferable skills can be included in the list of your work qualification summary. You can start it with the phrase “highlights of related skills:” and then create a bulleted list of all your identified transferable skills which you think will be highly valuable in the field of education.

You can also support your list of transferrable skills with solid examples of how you were able to use them successfully in your previous work experience. You can state these accomplishments by completing the following:

1. What are the main challenges you faced?
2. What type of action did you take to resolve these challenges?
3. What were the results of your actions?

Through answering these questions, you can build your confidence concerning your transferable skills which you can then apply to your new career in the field of education. The results from the questions above can also be used as vital accomplishments in your job history section of your resume to demonstrate your past successes. Taking the time to identify your transferable skills can help convince potential employers that you have what it takes to do extremely well in your new career in education. And by including it in your resume, you are creating a powerful and highly effective tool for your job search. With the use of transferable skills, you will present yourself in an advantageous position where you can increase your chances of being hired and of obtaining the position you want in the complex world of education.