How to build transferable skills
Increase your market value instead of just being good at your job
If you join a startup, there is a 50% chance that you will leave the company within 3 years. Numbers for Big Tech don’t look much different.
Gone are the days where you start at a company as an intern, move to a full-time role and work your way up to management to finally retire from that same company. And it’s not just companies we’re switching between; changing industries or roles is becoming more and more common, too.
This requires a different approach to career development.
If you want to maximize your market value and options in this new world, you need to invest in transferable skills. Your current company is interested in making sure that you are the most effective in your current role, creating value for your current company.
You, however, should make sure that in addition to excelling at your current job, you are maximizing the value you can bring to prospective employers.
This will not only open up more external job opportunities, but also give you more leverage in your current role. If your employer knows that you could very well take your skills elsewhere, they will invest more in retaining you.
Conversely, if they know that you are “locked into” your current role, you will have substantially less leverage in any negotiations about compensation, promotions etc.. Developing transferable skills is the ultimate form of investing in yourself.
In this article, I will cover:
What transferable skills and knowledge are
When to focus on transferable vs. non-transferable skills
How to acquire transferable skills
How to position your skills as transferable
Let’s dive in.
What are transferable skills and knowledge?
There are three types of skills that you are acquiring throughout your career:
Non-transferable: These are skills and knowledge that you can only use in your current job. This includes knowledge about your company’s product, internal tools and processes, knowledge of the org chart, internal politics etc.
Semi-transferable: These are skills and knowledge that you might be able to use outside of your current company, but only in some cases. This includes knowledge of specialized third-party tools, industry-specific best practices etc.
Transferable: These are skills and knowledge that can be broadly used across different companies, industries and job profiles. This includes “general purpose” skills like problem solving, data analytics, executive communication etc.
As a rule of thumb, non-transferable skills are most valuable in your current job and if you plan to continue down a narrow, specialized career path.
Transferable skills, on the other hand, create value over the longer-term course of your career and are especially valuable if you are not 100% certain that you want to continue doing what you’re doing right now for the rest of your career (which is likely most of us).
Which skills you should focus on changes over time; I’ll cover this next.
When should you focus on transferable skills?
A company hires you because of your (semi-)transferable skills.
During the interview process, they want to understand what impact you had in your previous roles and how you could transfer those learnings to their company.
However, once you are hired, you are facing a massive challenge: You are completely unfamiliar with the inner workings of the company and have no idea how to get stuff done.
So during your first few months, your focus should be on learning as much as possible about the company and the product.
For example, when I joined Facebook from Uber, I had a lot of Facebook-specific things to learn even though both roles were in Business Operations. Facebook had different data access policies, ran a completely different planning process and used internally developed tools for almost everything. Decision-making was also much more centralized and I needed to understand how to navigate the complex stakeholder landscape to get things done.
But once I understood how most things worked, going even deeper on internal specifics became less attractive. For example, instead of learning more about Facebook’s internal experimentation tool, it was more beneficial to learn about experimentation best practices more generally as I would be able to apply this both in my current job as well as outside of Facebook.
Another factor that affects the development of transferable skills is your seniority. As a junior IC, you spend most of your time in the weeds of a particular topic and you are expected to know every nuance. Given how narrow your scope and how tactical the work is, a lot of that knowledge is specific to your current role.
The more senior you get, you spend more of your time using and developing transferable skills. This is because of two reasons:
You spend more of your time on management, and management skills are generally more transferable as best practices don’t vary all that much between companies. For example, if you learn how to hire well, how to onboard employees, how to define priorities for your team etc., you will be able to do that anywhere
You focus on the bigger picture since you have a broader scope and are spending more time on prioritization, resource allocation etc. instead of execution. E.g. instead of running an experiment (which requires knowledge of specific tools etc. that only your current company might use), you learn how to decide which experiments are even worth doing. This insight is going to come in handy anywhere
#2 is the key lever that you can use to proactively acquire more transferable skills; let’s dig into how to do that.
How to acquire transferable skills
First of all, keep in mind that you need to be proactive about developing transferable skills. Your company is mainly interested in making you more effective in your current job; anything that goes beyond that purely makes you more valuable to other prospective employers, so it’s up to you to invest in these skills.
But how exactly do you acquire transferable skills?
For any problem you are working on, there is a specific solution that makes sense in your particular situation. This might or might not be the ideal solution for someone else working on a similar problem in a different team or at a different company.
If you just focus on solving the problem in front of you, you will learn very little that will make you successful in future roles. Copy-pasting past solutions onto new problems rarely works.
Instead, try to generalize the problem and identify the factors that affect what the ideal solution looks like. That way, you learn the formula that allows you to solve that type of problem and you’ll be able to do it again in your next job, even if the situation is slightly different.
Here are some examples of what that looks like in practice:
Learn best practices. For example, instead of trying to fix that specific friction point in your user onboarding funnel, learn how the best companies design frictionless onboarding experiences and apply the learnings
Understand the bigger picture. For example, instead of just trying to get your proposal approved, observe how executives make these decisions. What aspects are they drilling into? What risks do they seem most concerned about? How are they allocating resources and making trade-off decisions?
Study systems. For example, study your company’s go-to-market tech stack or data infrastructure. Which parts work seamlessly, and where do you see friction? Knowing how to work with your company’s stack will help you in your current job, but understanding how to design a high-performance GTM tech stack (and what mistakes to avoid) is something that will make you impactful beyond your current role
Generalize. Instead of learning specific SQL syntax, learn how to structure queries and join different types of tables to solve a problem. SQL syntax will vary depending on whether your company uses SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc., so you might have to relearn it anyways
Spot inefficiencies. Analyze your company’s org structure and processes. Which decisions take too many people to make? Which processes are needlessly complicated? That way, you can not only navigate the org better and get stuff done, but also 1) help streamline things in your current company and 2) help your future employers avoid the mistakes you saw firsthand
I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn company-specific information or specific tools. E.g. if you are in Sales and your company uses Salesforce, you will have to develop expertise in it even if you next company might use a different CRM. But zooming out and focusing on the transferable part of the problem will make sure that you are not starting from zero in your next job and that companies see your experience as relevant, even if they do things differently.
How to position your skills as transferable
Sometimes, transferable skills and knowledge come in disguise. When you are interviewing for new roles, it’s your job to position your experience as transferable and relevant for the new company.
When I transitioned into B2B SaaS for the first time, people initially assumed my B2C experience would not be applicable. For example, I had never done any forecasting for a B2B GTM motion; I had, however, done extensive forecasting for Facebook’s ads business.
At first glance, this might seem like apples and oranges, so I had to put in a little effort to position my experience as transferable. To do that, I focused on highlighting common forecasting themes that are equally relevant in both B2C and B2B; for example:
Which team should be owning the forecast? Finance, BizOps, Data Science, or the teams that sign up for the goals?
How do you combine quantitative approaches like time-series forecasting with assumptions from the business on the expected impact from new initiatives and product features?
The key is to go from “Here is what I did” to “Here is what I did and how it applies to your company and the problem you’re facing”. By showing that I had faced challenges that any forecasting work stream would need to deal with and that I worked through them from first principles, I was able to give my new company confidence that I would be able to handle the project even if I hadn’t done that exact thing before.
The ideal candidate for many companies is someone who has enough familiarity with the problem so that they can hit the ground running, but brings a fresh perspective
Closing thoughts
Nobody cares about your career like you do; your current employer definitely doesn’t. Take control of your career trajectory and invest in transferable skills. Your future you will thank you.