Transferable skills are not vague skills

“Transferable skills” has been used so often that it has almost lost its meaning. On a CV it can mean everything and nothing. Yet it describes something real and verifiable, and anyone with a hybrid path like mine benefits from making it concrete rather than leaving it vague.

Read quickly, my profile is a list of different things: technical training, communication studies, photography and audiovisual production, entrepreneurial projects, project and account management, and sales. Someone hiring for a specific role can read it in two ways: as a person who never went deeply into anything, or as someone able to connect fields that rarely speak to one another. Both readings are legitimate. The difference lies in demonstrating which one is true.

The problem with vagueness

Transferable skills become vague when described through adjectives rather than behaviours. Flexibility, problem-solving, broad perspective and relationship skills are labels anyone can claim and nobody can verify. Recruiters are right to approach them sceptically. The problem is not that the skills do not exist, but that their description makes them indistinguishable from imitation.

My solution was to stop using adjectives and describe what I actually do when a transferable skill comes into play. Not “I see the big picture”, but “when a customer requests a feature, I first identify the business problem they are trying to solve, and the right answer is often different from what they requested”. The second statement can be tested; the first cannot.

What a hybrid profile does in practice

Three situations from my current sales role in a tech company make the value of my hybrid profile concrete.

The first is translation. A technology negotiation involves at least two languages: that of the people building the product and that of those buying it. My technical training lets me understand the first without excessive simplification; communication studies help me turn it into the second without losing meaning. I am neither a technician nor a pure salesperson, and here the middle position is a strength, not a compromise.

The second is reading the context. Photography trained me to observe before acting; project management taught me to identify who really decides and who influences the decision. In a customer meeting those skills combine, helping me understand unspoken concerns and who needs convincing or reassurance before I present anything. Done well, that work makes the proposal almost secondary.

The third is the sustainability of the promise. Having worked in production and project management, I know what happens after the signature: the real cost of delivery, where projects stall and which promises are easy to make but hard to keep. It makes me a salesperson who promises less and delivers what was promised — less dazzling in the short term, but better at building lasting relationships.

None of these situations requires a special talent. They require a combination of different experiences held together by the habit of asking what the other person genuinely needs before answering. That — not a list of adjectives — is what I mean by transferable skills.

The cost of a hybrid profile

It would be dishonest to describe only the advantages. A hybrid profile carries a cost: in every individual field, somebody is better prepared than I am. A technician knows the product better, a pure salesperson closes faster, and a specialised project manager handles more complex plans. If a role requires vertical excellence in one dimension, the hybrid profile loses.

It wins when the work sits at the joins: between departments, languages, promise and delivery. Such positions exist in almost every organisation but rarely appear as such on an organisation chart. People with hybrid profiles must recognise them and explain why they are right for them. Waiting for somebody else to work it out rarely succeeds.

"A transferable skill is only real if you can explain what it does when it walks into a room."

Making them concrete is ongoing work

Making transferable skills concrete is not a one-off CV exercise. It means noticing, whenever a situation ends well, which combination of experiences made that possible, and finding words to explain it without rhetoric. This website also serves that purpose: collecting those situations and words so that, the next time somebody asks what I can do, the answer is not a string of adjectives.

Transferable skills are not vague. Their descriptions often are — and unlike the skills themselves, a description can be corrected immediately.

Explore working between technology, communication and people and changing context without losing the thread.