Transferrable Skills Guide

Communicating Your Competencies and Transferrable Skills Using Action Verbs

Competencies are a combination of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes that are relevant to work and life. They are transferable across all industries and fields. Demonstrating your competencies throughout your application materials is essential to communicating your ability to meet or exceed the qualifications of your opportunity of interest.

Instructions: To begin to develop an idea of where you are in your professional development journey, tally one point for each action verb you check in each Competency Group. Once you have tallied the skills in each competency group, you can visualize your strengths and areas of growth in your professional development and be able to communicate them.

Critical Thinking

The ability to process and interpret information objectively in order to make decisions. And the capacity to reflect upon the outcomes of decisions made in order to inform future actions.

Analytical

Create/Innovate

Financial

Communication Skills

The ability to effectively exchange thoughts and ideas with others through listening, speaking, writing, and nonverbal interactions.

Communication

Interpersonal Skills

Sense of Self

The ability to demonstrate ethics, self-management, identity and values awareness, motivation, and initiative, and emotional intelligence.

Initiative

Management

Teamwork

The ability to navigate interactions with a variety of individuals to contribute to a common goal while exhibiting the ability to manage conflict, an appreciation and engagement with/of diversity, understanding of group dynamics, and collaboration.

Train/Consult/Team

Counsel & Serve/Team

Leadership

Constructing Effective Bullet Points for Your Resume/CV, Cover Letter, and Interviewing

• Begin each bullet point with a present tense action verb – if it happened in the past, use past tense verbs
• Use formula ACTION VERB + TASK + RESULT
• Answer the questions, “What did I accomplish?,” “How did I do this?”, “Why is this important?”
• Focus on quantifiable accomplishments vs. tasks and job duties
• Avoid repeating same action verbs and fragments
• Use verbs similar to those found in the job posting or a description of that kind of work

Areas of Growth Goal Setting

If you find that you are not as proficient as you would like to be, stop by the Career Connections Center to outline a plan to work on your professional development to prepare for your next step.