✨ Activity: Skills Employers Want

Versatility of Transferable Skills

Skills you have developed in one profession are often relevant and valuable in another, seemingly unrelated field. Consider the transferable skills you’ve developed in your career and volunteer opportunities, and how they might support unexpected opportunities in your own career journey.

By examining examples like a dancer transitioning into cyber-security and political leadership, we see the hidden connections between disciplines.

Example:

A Professor of Enterprise and Competitiveness, University of Birmingham connected the skills of a professional dancer who made a successful career change to political administration using his transferable skills.

Rahm Emanuel trained as a ballet dancer and eventually became senior advisor to Bill Clinton between 1993 and 1998, then chief of staff at the White House to Barack Obama and finally mayor of Chicago.

Dance as a career involves extraordinarily high levels of commitment, concentration, persistence, passion and training. Dance and cyber security are both about patterns, rhythms and attention to detail. There is nothing to suggest that dance is not a suitable pathway towards computer programming … and would be unable to compete in the world of cyber security. — (Bryson, 2020, para. 5, 7).