Welcome to Part Two of my careers advice notes. Part One is here. This part is about transferable skills in general: what they are and working out if you’ve got any. Part Three will cover ones specific to PhDs, and how to market the damn things.
If you’ve had any careers’ service exposure at all, you’ll know of transferable skills. They’re those annoying things you have to demonstrate on your CV or resumé with examples of your brilliance, as opposed to just saying you’ve got them. You know, the standard “Our team won first prize for_______. I contributed to the smooth functioning of the team by_____.” instead of “I am good at teamwork“. The stuff that feels like over-egging yourself, and feels like a tick-boxing exercise of the sort so beloved by HR with their wretched ‘Personal Development Programmes’. As you can tell, I’m maybe not so fond of them! However, the speakers at the conference had a lot of useful advice, of which I’m going to share as much as I can remember.
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The first thing the speakers said was that, as a science PhD graduate looking to work outside of science, you have a reputation, or rather a stereotype, to overcome. If you ask Joe Public what he thinks a scientist is like, you’ll get a description of someone who is too focused on nit-picky details (à la classic geek), who prefers to work alone (with the concomitant lack of team-work skills), and who is so shy they simply cannot speak in public. If you come from the hard sciences, they’ll expect you to be better at numbers than words. They may also think you’re a bit wacky or expect you to have evil genius powers. Muwhahahaha.

“Same thing we do every night, Pinky…”
Ahem.
These negative stereotypes are less of a concern if you’re looking for work in fields related to science that regularly or solely hire science post-graduates/post-docs, but you do still have to prove you have the desired soft skills. It’s hard, I know.
So, what are these elusive transferable skills?
Essentially, a transferable skill is one that you can use wherever you go. Continue reading →