Future-Prepare Yourself with Transferable Skills

Have you ever worried about the future of your job?

I have. Not hypothetically. I was part of that statistic, and it was not fun. The fear, the anxiety, the specific pit in your stomach when you can't see what's next and suspect it might not include you.

What changed it for me was a concept that sounds almost too simple: transferable skills.

Transferable skills, sometimes called portable skills, are the core capabilities you carry that move with you regardless of industry, organization, or title. Most people feel trapped inside their job title, because the title is what they've been trained to describe themselves with. But the title is a label an employer applied to a bundle of capabilities. The capabilities are yours. They were before that job and they will be after it.

Understanding that genuinely changed my relationship to work. Not because it made me immune to change, since nobody is, but because it moved my sense of security from something an employer controls to something I do.

This is one of the more personal pieces I've written for a business audience. I wrote it in April 2020, when U.S. unemployment had passed 13 percent and a lot of people were feeling exactly what I'd felt years earlier.

If you're worried about where your work is going, start here. It's the most useful reframe I know.