Dear Mr. Jones: Although your credentials are indeed impressive, we have selected a candidate who better fits our needs. Best of luck in your future endeavors.
Frustrating, isn't it? What in the world do they mean by "fit?" The notion of "fit" strikes most of us as hopelessly subjective and another recipe for hash, rather like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Are the ingredients of fit unknowable and uncontrollable? If we hit it off with a networking contact or a potential employer, is it strictly a matter of chance?
If the best qualified person doesn't always get the job, who does? Is it the person who makes the employer most comfortable? What qualities make an employer most comfortable?
A strong evidence that you the candidate can do what you claim; that and that you can add immediate, tangible value in exchange for the employer's pay and perhaps have a personal style or a set of traits and values that are compatible with the employer's.
What distinguishes you from all the other job seekers who may have similar credentials? The first component on the "fit" side is your particular array of transferable abilities (TAs). Let me emphasize that, in our nomenclature, skills and abilities are very different. If expertise is the synonym for a particular technical skill, then the synonym for transferable abilities is experience.
Suppose you say, "I have the ability to run a four-minute mile." All that phrase really means is, "I have run a four-minute mile at least once." Somewhere in your past (that is, in your experience) is a four-minute mile, and logic says that if you were able to do it once, presumably you can do it again. If I am an employer who runs a courier service and values employees who are fleet-of-foot, the best proof of what you can do for me is what you've done before. Remember this principle: Abilities = Past behaviors = Experience.
The best way to describe a transferable ability is to say, "I have done X," not "I know X." When someone says, in a networking meeting or in an interview, "I have the ability to keep my head when those around me lose theirs," he's paraphrasing some prior experience: "I have performed calmly in situations that involved great emotional stress."
If this line of logic holds true, then every job seeker naturally should be articulate at describing his abilities and his experience, right? Isn't he just describing accomplishments that have already happened? Only if you think it's that easy for the average person to rattle off his abilities.
Most of us are self-aware; that is, we can remember the things we've done in our lives and we have clear images of the ones that turned out well. But having an implicit understanding of our past accomplishments doesn't mean that we can call those accomplishments up in our mind's eye on demand and communicate them explicitly to someone else.
In this phase of your self-assessment process, your task is to inventory the experiences and accomplishments you've already had and learn to describe them in terms that are meaningful and attractive to the job market. Before we discuss how to do that, however, you may want to know where "transferable" comes into our discussion of transferable abilities.
Unlike technical skills, which tend to be anchored to a particular setting, transferable abilities aren't confined to any one job or situation. As an example, consider "troubleshooting," a classic transferable ability. If you turn into a demon troubleshooter when the document package for a real estate closing is missing a few pages, you'll find that same ability emerging when things threaten to get out of hand at a PTA meeting, or when the caterer delivers your daughter's wedding cake to the wrong house, or when the car starts making strange noises a half hour after you've passed the Last Chance Gas Station in the Nevada desert.
This element of transferability is the salvation of career changers. It is, first and foremost, what they have to learn to sell. Suppose you did a splendid job of planning and implementing a new employee assistance program at Mega Big Manufacturing. Isn't it fair to infer that you'd be pretty good at developing and running a community outreach program for your city's Department of Aging? Or developing a new tuition reimbursement program at your local university? Or helping to get an Outward Bound program up and running for inner-city kids?
The trick, then, is to learn to describe your transferable abilities in terms that are succinct enough to register clearly in the mind of a networking contact or potential employer. The best way to do this is to think of your accomplishments and experiences in terms of their functional components.
In emphasizing your transferable abilities to the job market, what you're really doing is proving your ability to generalize, to apply experience gained in one setting to another one. In making cabinet selections, the president doesn't focus primarily on technical skills ("Have you ever been a Secretary of State before?"). On the contrary, he's looking for desired strengths and competencies that have been amply demonstrated in other settings.
For younger networkers or anyone at the outset of a working career, the transferable abilities question poses a major problem: How do you sell your experience and past accomplishments when you aren't old enough, or working long enough to have many? The time-honored answer is that those who don't have much experience to sell must rely primarily on the other categories. They can sell their technical skills ("I just got out of school with a degree in computer science and expertise in fourth-generation computer languages") or their personal qualities, intelligence, energy, interpersonal abilities, and so on.
Some younger job seekers are helped by the fact that some abilities aren't developed through life experience; instead, they stem from natural aptitude. Not everyone brings significant natural aptitude to the job market, but a gene pool will occasionally load a person with some powerful natural tools: quantitative aptitude, mathematical aptitude, creativity, critical thinking ability, logic, visual spatial perception, and physical endurance.
A journalist once asked Greg LeMond, champion bike racer and three-time winner of the Tour de France, how to become a world-class racer. "First," said LeMond, "get yourself a set of parents with the right genes."
If you're blessed with a natural aptitude, you know it. It generally will have emerged long before you became old enough to begin work. Your main tasks, therefore, will be (1) finding a way to describe that natural aptitude succinctly and (2) convincing others that you do in fact have it.
Most transferable abilities are described by saying, "I have done." Aptitudes are described by saying "I'm a natural at . . . ." Frequently, a natural aptitude will not constitute the core of what you're going to sell to the working world, except perhaps in singing or musical performance. More often, aptitudes serve as enhancers of other qualities and should be described that way.
