Understanding transferable skills

Transferable skills often come from formal work experience or education, but just as often from military service, volunteer work, caregiving, community organizing or the kind of problem-solving that happens outside a job title entirely. 

Employers value these skills because they can reduce onboarding and ramp-up time. A candidate who already knows how to manage competing priorities or navigate ambiguity can often contribute sooner and move across teams with less guidance.

What are transferable skills?

Transferable skills are abilities developed in one setting that can be applied across roles, industries and functions. Some involve tools or processes; others are about how someone works with people or solves problems. Both types affect performance regardless of department or title.

As AI takes on more routine and technical tasks, this is becoming more visible, not less. Indeed Hiring Lab’s research on business operations skills found these fundamentals show up in nearly three-quarters of all U.S. job postings, far outpacing any AI or technology-specific skill category. As AI absorbs more of the mundane, technical work, what’s left standing out is judgment, critical thinking and leadership, which are the things AI can’t do.

And these skills don’t look identical in every candidate. Communication and interpersonal styles vary by culture, personality, ability and individual pacing. Directness, formality and tempo differ across people without any of those differences making someone less effective, they’re different expressions of the same underlying skill, and each approach may benefit your team.

Difference between soft skills and transferable skills

Soft skills are abilities that shape how someone works with others, such as communicating clearly, listening with empathy, collaborating toward shared goals and giving or receiving feedback constructively.

Transferable skills cast a wider net, covering the broader capabilities that let someone adapt and perform across different roles: picking up new tools quickly, learning fast in unfamiliar environments, stepping in where a team needs support and applying critical thinking to solve problems or improve a process.

In practice, the two overlap frequently, most soft skills are also transferable skills, just with a narrower, human-focused lens.

Why employers seek transferable skills

Transferable skills help you find candidates who can meet business needs even when a background doesn’t align perfectly with the job description. Employees who manage time well, learn systems quickly or work cross-functionally tend to ramp up faster, cover gaps during busy periods and step into evolving roles without a full retraining cycle. This also pays off in retention: people who feel confident navigating change are more likely to stay engaged and take on new responsibility.

The top skills to prioritize

• Communication: Expressing ideas clearly, adapting messaging for different audiences and delivering updates through the right channel.
• Critical thinking: Evaluating complex situations, weighing alternatives and predicting likely outcomes.
• Leadership: Guiding a project, mentoring others and making decisions under pressure.
• Problem-solving: Spotting inefficiency early, diagnosing root causes and testing solutions.
• Time management: Structuring priorities and keeping shared work on track.
• Analytical thinking: Spotting patterns in data and drawing conclusions that hold up.
• Interpersonal skills: Listening, resolving conflict and sharing credit.
• Adaptability: Staying productive as tools, teams or priorities shift.
• Creativity: Generating new approaches, not just following the existing playbook.
• Project management: Setting goals, assigning tasks and following through to completion.
• Writing: Producing clear documentation and communication without ambiguity.
• Active listening: Understanding what’s actually being said before responding.
• Decision-making: Weighing data and experience to choose a path, especially under time pressure.
• Relationship-building: Building trust and rapport across teams, clients or vendors.
• Technical fluency: Working confidently within the specific tools or platforms a role requires.
• Emotional intelligence: Managing stress, reading a room and staying steady under pressure.
• Dependability: Meeting commitments without needing oversight to do it.
• Organization: Managing competing priorities without letting anything slip.
• Research: Finding credible information and using it to ground a decision.
• Conflict resolution: Staying objective and finding shared ground in a tense conversation.

How to identify transferable skills in candidates

Look for how a candidate has applied core strengths across different roles or settings. Adaptability and the ability to learn on the job can develop outside formal work or education. Candidates may also build leadership or organizational skills through military service, volunteer work, caregiving or community projects.

Start with the job description

Identifying transferable skills starts long before the interview. A lot of transferable-skill hiring goes wrong before a candidate ever applies. Job descriptions built around a specific past title (“3+ years as a project coordinator”) often screen out people who’ve done the actual work under a different name. 

Someone who managed logistics and communication for a 200-person deployment, coordinated care schedules for a family member or ran point on a community organization’s volunteer program has likely built real project management and stakeholder communication skills, without ever holding a job titled “project coordinator.” 

Consider writing the job description around the skills and the outcomes they produce.

Consider how candidates describe their experience

Be open to how people describe their skills and how they developed them on the resume. Military experience, in particular, can be overlooked because it doesn’t map cleanly onto civilian job titles. 

A logistics role in the military often involves budget management, supply chain coordination and leading a team under real pressure, skills that translate directly, but they may be described in military-specific language an ATS or hiring manager isn’t reading for. 

The same is true for skills built in non-traditional classrooms: apprenticeships, bootcamps, community college programs or on-the-job training. These experiences are qualifications, and may deserve the same weight as a traditional criteria once you know how to recognize its value.

Ask about past experience

Situational and behavioral questions about challenges someone’s actually navigated often surface communication, problem-solving and adaptability more reliably than a direct “what are your strengths” ask. 

Prompt for specifics: a time priorities shifted suddenly, a time they had to learn something fast, a time they had to coordinate people who didn’t report to them. The goal is to hear how someone actually handles real demands.

Look for multiple signals

Validate with more than one signal. No single interview question proves a transferable skill, look for the same pattern showing up more than once. 

Reference checks can speak to how someone’s grown or adapted over time, in a way a candidate can’t fully self-report. Take-home assignments or short work samples can validate a specific applied skill directly, rather than relying on a candidate’s description of it. 

And watching how someone responds to feedback, in the interview itself, often previews their growth mindset better than anything they say about themselves.

Use skills data to identify overlap across roles

Skills Map by Indeed draws on millions of U.S. job postings to show which skills employers seek across different industries. Comparing skill profiles can help you identify transferable skills and evaluate candidates based on relevant abilities, even when their previous job titles or industries differ from your open role.

FAQs

How do transferable skills support cross-training? 

Employees with strong transferable skills often move between functions more easily, which makes it simpler to build internal coverage for key tasks.

How can transferable skills help during organizational change?

When structures, tools or priorities shift, employees with transferable skills adapt faster and help stabilize the team around them, reducing downtime for everyone else.