What Color Is Your Parachute? (43 page)

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Authors: Richard N. Bolles

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All right, then, if transferable skills are the heart of your vision and your destiny, let’s see just exactly what transferable skills
are.

Here are the most important truths you need to keep in mind about transferable, functional skills:

You can see this from this diagram:

Click
here
to view a PDF version of Skills as the Basic Unit of Work.

Now, let’s look at the very bottom level of the above diagram. It says “skill.” That means “transferable skills.” On the next page is a famous diagram of them, invented by the late Sidney A. Fine (reprinted by his permission).

Click
here
to view a PDF version of Data, People, and Things.

As we see in the functional/transferable skills diagram above, your transferable skills break down into three
families,
according to whether you use them with
Data/Information, People,
or
Things.
And again, as this diagram makes clear, within each family there are
simple
skills, and there are higher, or
more complex
skills, so that these all can be diagrammed as inverted pyramids, with the simpler skills at the bottom, and the more complex ones in order above it, as shown above.

Incidentally, as a general rule—to which there are exceptions—each
higher
skill requires you to be able also to do all those skills listed below it. So of course you can claim
those,
as well. But you want to especially claim the highest skill you legitimately can, on each pyramid, based on what you have already proven you can do, in the past.

Simpler skills can be, and usually are, heavily
prescribed
(by the employer), so if you claim
only
the simpler skills, you will have to
“fit in”
—following the instructions of your supervisor, and doing exactly what you are told to do. The
higher
the skills you can legitimately claim, the more you will be given discretion to carve out the job the way you want to—so that it truly fits
you
.

Not for you the way of classified ads, resumes, and agencies, that we spoke of in earlier chapters. No, if you can legitimately claim higher skills, then to find such jobs you
must
follow the step-by-step process I am describing here.

The essence of this approach to job-hunting or career-change is that once you have identified your favorite transferable skills, and your favorite special knowledges, you may then approach
any organization that interests you, whether they have a known vacancy or not.
Naturally, whatever places you visit—and particularly those that have not advertised any vacancy—you will find far fewer job-hunters that you have to compete with.

In fact, if the employers you visit happen to like you well enough, they may be willing to create for you a job that does not presently exist.
In which case, you will be competing with no one, since you will be the sole applicant for that newly created job.
While this doesn’t happen all the time, it is astounding to me how many times it
does
happen.
The reason
it does is that the employers often have been
thinking
about creating a new job within their organization, for quite some time—but with this and that, they just have never gotten around to
doing
it. Until you walked in.

Then they decided they didn’t want to let you get away, since
good employees are as hard to find as are good employers.
And they suddenly remember that job they have been thinking about creating for many weeks or months, now. So they dust off their
intention
, create the job on the spot, and offer it to you! And if that new job is not only what
they
need, but is exactly what
you
were looking for, then you have a dream job. Match-match. Win-win.

From our country’s perspective, it is also interesting to note this: by this job-hunting initiative of yours, you have helped accelerate the creation of more jobs in your country, which is so much on everybody’s mind here in the new millennium. How nice to help your country, as well as yourself!

Functional/transferable skills are often confused with
traits, t em peraments,
or
type
.
²People think transferable skills are such things as:
has lots of energy, gives attention to details, gets along well with people, shows determination, works well under pressure, is sym pathetic, intuitive, persistent, dynamic, dependable,
etc. Despite popular misconceptions, these are
not
functional/transferable skills, but traits, or the
style
with which you do your transferable skills. For example, take
“gives attention to details.”
If one of your
transferable skills
is
“conducting research”
then
“gives attention to details”
describes the manner or style with which you do the transferable skill called
conducting research.
If you want to know what your traits are, popular tests such as the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
measure that sort of thing.