If you’ve been trying to figure out what your transferable skills are so you can apply them to a new, better career: slow down! Let’s save you some trouble, because there are 3 problems with changing careers based on transferable skills.

Mistake 1: You think that if know my transferable skills, I’ll know the right career.

FALSE.

It’s not that transferable skills don’t matter, but your skills are just part of the equation when it comes to choosing a meaningful career.

When you over-focus on your skills, you end up applying for the same kinds of jobs you’ve already had and know you don’t want. Then you end up in interviews for jobs you don’t want. It ends up being an enormous frustration and a waste of time.

Instead, what you need is a holistic strategy for choosing the right kind of work that accounts for not only your skills, but your sense of purpose, your income, your work style, the work environment you do best in, and kind of the life you want outside of work.

That way you won’t just apply for the same ole stuff.

You will run into this problem if you work with the wrong kind of career professional at the wrong stage of a career change timeline. I have a whole video about when to hire a career coach, so go check that out when you’re done here.

But if you aren’t clear on what you want to do and you go to a resume writer to help you get a job, what they’re going to do is look at your current resume and optimize your new resume to get you more of the same.

So unless you want more of the same, you need to take a holistic approach to figure out what you want to give to and get from your career. This is what I do with all my clients.

Mistake 2: You think you don’t have enough skills.

“My skills are too niche.”

“My skills are too general.”

”Maybe I need to go back to school to add more skills.”

You most likely do NOT have a skills problem. It’s much more likely that you have a CRITERIA problem.

Meaning: you don’t know HOW to choose a meaningful career because you don’t know what would be fulfilling for you. If you’ve been brainstorming job titles, if you’ve been hyper-focused on “what career can I turn this skill into?” without getting down the substance and circumstances of the work, this will ring especially true.

If you keep applying for jobs you don’t even want, start and abandon business ideas, and change your mind about what you think you want to do over and over again then FOR SURE you have a criteria problem.

So before you go off and acquire more skills (I’m looking at you, people who think you need to go back to school, do a certification program, or take some kind of boot camp) make sure you have the criteria with which to choose a career.

And then, once you’re certain you know what you want to do, and certain that it will require additional skills, you can look into ways to fill any skill gaps that you have.

Remember this: Skill acquisition is for people who KNOW what they want to do, NOT people who are trying to figure out what they want to do.

Mistake 3: You overlook your inherent skills.

When you think of your skills, you exclusively think of your formal education and what you do in the job you have now.

If you don’t like the job you have now, you may be using all kinds of skills you don’t want to keep using. Things that feel unnatural to you. That makes you feel incompetent. Or that you’re amazing at, but completely drain you to do.

So it’s not going to help to identify transferable skills if the skills are part of what’s making you miserable.

We also need to know our inherent skills – those things that are so inherent to who we are and how we operate that you’re doing to do them in ANY role. So let’s make sure we put you in roles and environments where that thing you naturally do is valued and rewarded.

If you want work that feels like a natural extension of yourself, this is one of the secret ingredients to figuring it out.

But, this can be hard to do. Because your inherent skills come so naturally to you, sometimes you forget they’re there. Or you think “Everyone just does this.”

Or most insidious, you think that because it comes naturally to you, you don’t deserve to be paid for you. And that you should only be paid when you’re struggling and breaking a sweat.

This is another reason that your skills alone are not the cornerstone to choosing a career. You’ve also got to adjust your relationship to work or you will continue to repeat old patterns. Listing your transferable skills won’t save you from that.

Want to do more meaningful work? Stop hyper-focusing on transferable skills and learn a holistic strategy to choose the right career.