Transferable Skills Without the Buzzwords

Every career-change guide tells you to lead with your transferable skills. Almost none of them tell you what that looks like on the page, so people write this:

Excellent communication skills · Strong problem solver · Highly organised · Works well under pressure · Team player · Adaptable

Six claims, zero information. A reader has seen that exact list a thousand times, has no way to tell whether it’s true, and skips it. It occupies prime space at the top of the page and does nothing.

The problem isn’t that those skills aren’t real or aren’t transferable. It’s that the adjective is the wrong unit. Nobody can evaluate “strong communicator.” Everybody can evaluate a sentence describing a thing you communicated, to whom, and what happened.

The conversion

Take the vague claim, and ask three questions: What did I actually do? For whom? What changed as a result? Then write that instead.

Claim: Excellent communication skills Reality behind it: You were a nurse who explained treatment plans to frightened patients and their families, and you ran the shift handover. Written for a resume:

Explained treatment plans and discharge instructions to patients and families, often in distressing circumstances; ran twice-daily shift handovers for a team of nine.

Claim: Highly organised Reality: You were a restaurant manager doing the rota for eighteen staff across seven days with constant sickness cover. Written:

Built and maintained weekly rotas for 18 staff across seven-day trading, including same-day cover for absences.

Claim: Strong problem solver Reality: When the till system went down on a Saturday you improvised a paper process and reconciled it later. Written:

Kept service running through a full point-of-sale outage on a peak trading day using a manual process, then reconciled 200+ transactions afterwards with no losses recorded.

None of these use the word “communication,” “organised,” or “problem-solving.” They don’t need to. The reader draws the conclusion themselves, which is a much stronger position than being told.

Numbers you can actually stand behind

You’ll notice the rewrites contain figures: nine people, eighteen staff, seven days, 200 transactions. Concrete numbers do enormous work — they turn a claim into a scene.

But only use numbers you can defend in an interview.

Good: headcount, frequency, volumes you handled, timeframes, budget you were responsible for, number of sites or classes or clients. You know these.
Risky: percentage improvements you didn’t measure. “Increased efficiency by 40%” invites “how did you measure that?” and if the honest answer is “I didn’t, it felt faster,” you’ve created a problem.
Fine alternative: describe the change qualitatively but specifically. “Replaced a three-spreadsheet process with a single tracker used by the whole department” is checkable and impressive without an invented percentage.

If you don’t have a number, don’t manufacture one. A specific description beats a fabricated statistic every time, and it survives scrutiny.

Which skills are actually transferable

Not all of them are, and pretending otherwise wastes space. A useful sorting:

Genuinely transferable, and worth leading with:

Managing people, rotas, or workloads
Handling a budget or reconciling money
Working with software the target field also uses — spreadsheets, CRMs, ticketing systems, scheduling tools
Writing that other people relied on: reports, documentation, procedures
Dealing with regulated or safety-critical processes
Training or onboarding other staff
Handling difficult conversations with customers, patients, parents, or clients

Transferable but needs translation:

Domain knowledge from the old field, if the new employer serves that sector. An ex-teacher applying to an education-technology company has an enormous advantage. The same ex-teacher applying to a logistics firm mostly doesn’t. Read the employer before deciding how much weight the domain gets.

Usually not worth listing:

Anything that is a baseline expectation of adult employment. “Punctual,” “reliable,” “hardworking,” “team player.” These aren’t differentiators; listing them can read as though you had nothing stronger.

Where to put them

Two placements, and they do different jobs.

In a short skills block near the top, list the concrete, nameable things: tools, systems, methods, languages, certifications. Nouns, not adjectives. Excel (pivot tables, Power Query) · SQL · Xero · Rota scheduling · CIPD Level 3. This block is scannable and it’s where a reader checks for hard requirements.

Inside the job bullets, put everything else. The behavioural, human, “soft” skills only work when they’re embedded in an event. That’s the conversion above.

What you’re avoiding is the third placement — the adjective list masquerading as a skills section. If a line in your skills block is an adjective, it belongs in a bullet or nowhere.

A note on informal and unpaid work

Career changers often have relevant experience that didn’t come with a payslip: running a club’s finances, building a website for a friend’s business, managing a renovation, freelance work done for two clients and never invoiced properly.

That work counts, and you can put it on a resume — as long as you describe it accurately.

Volunteer treasurer — Eastside Running Club · 2023 – present Manage the club’s accounts (approx. £14,000 annual turnover), reconcile monthly, and report to a committee of six.

That’s honest, specific, and directly relevant to a finance-adjacent role. What it must not become is Financial Controller — Eastside Running Club, which inflates a volunteer role into a job title that doesn’t exist. Accuracy of the label matters as much as accuracy of the content.

The test to run on every line

Read each bullet on your resume and ask: could a competitor for this job write this exact sentence?

“Excellent communication skills” — yes, all of them could, word for word. “Ran twice-daily shift handovers for a team of nine on a surgical ward” — no. That’s yours.

Anything in the first category is either deleted or converted. By the time every line is in the second category, you’ll find you no longer need the buzzword list at the top, because the whole document is doing that work — with evidence attached.