It's a given that when embarking on a career path we must gain specific skills and training relevant to our area of work. A crane operator needs good hand-eye coordination, depth perception, quick decision-making ability and the know-how to operate large machinery. A teacher needs to be a good communicator, to have patience and empathy along with the ability to creatively motivate and challenge learners.
But beyond job-specific skills are a number of "transferable" skills that are required in virtually every occupation. You can apply transferable skills to any job and take them with you along your career journey. They include skills like communicating effectively and working with others - abilities that are necessary in any career and that are highly valued by employers.
Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) has produced a list of nine transferable skills deemed "essential" by Canadian employers. These essential skills, also known as transferable skills or employability skills, enable you to perform the tasks required by your occupation and other activities of daily life, provide you with a foundation to learn other skills, and enhance your ability to adapt to workplace change. Essential skills are not specific to any one career and they are not highly technical in nature, rather they are the skills people use to carry out a wide variety of everyday life and occupational tasks, and believe it or not, you've been using many of them throughout your life.
Essential Skills
1. Reading Text
Reading text involves the ability to read and comprehend notes, letters, memos, manuals, regulations, books, reports or journals. It also includes the ability to read forms and labels, print and non-print media (text on computer screens and microfiche) paragraph-length text in charts, tables and graphs.
2. Document Use
Slightly different than reading text, document use refers to the understanding of information displays in which words, numbers, icons and other visual characteristics such as colour and shape are given meaning by their spatial arrangement. This includes graphs, lists, tables, blueprints, drawings, signs and labels.
3. Writing
Another essential skill for both work and daily life, writing skills include the ability to write texts both by hand and digitally, as well as the ability to fill in forms.
4. Numeracy
The effective use of numbers is a crucial skill in many occupational areas, and includes the ability to undertake basic calculations and to think in quantitative terms.
5. Oral Communication
Oral communication pertains primarily to the use of speech to give and exchange thoughts and information.
6. Thinking Skills
This category includes problem-solving, decision-making, job task planning and organizing, and significant use of memory and finding information.
7. Working with Others
While some occupations are based on individual work, many require teamwork and the ability to co-operate with others. This skill involves getting along with a variety of people, dividing tasks, providing feedback and working as a group toward a common goal.
8. Computer Use
This skill includes an understanding of basic computer functions and programs, the ability use e-mail and the Internet, and a sense of comfort with computers along with the ability to learn new applications as needed.
9. Continuous Learning
Continuous learning involves knowing how to learn, understanding one's own learning style and knowing how to gain access to a variety of materials, resources and learning opportunities.
Assessing Your Skills
In developing your portfolio of essential skills, it is useful to begin by assessing your strengths and weaknesses. One way to do this, says Kurtis Kitagawa, who developed an Employability Skills Toolkit for the Conference Board of Canada, which helps learners to assess and improve their skills, is to reflect on the things you do at home, at school, at work or in the community and on how these activities demonstrate your skills. Take a look at the classes in which you do well at school, the hobbies at which you excel and the tasks at which you are particularly competent. These should give you some clues as to your strongest skill areas.
Developing Your Essential Skills
Everyone has areas in which they are strong, and areas that aren't as well developed. For those skill categories that could use a bit of work, the Employability Skills Toolkit offers a process for undertaking specific skill development. "Skill challenges involve problem-solving," says Kitagawa. "You go from seeing what you might be able to do in a skill area, to targeting in stages what you want to be able to do."
The following steps will help you develop your skills:
- Doing
Perform the skill as well as you can, even if you're not fully aware of all its qualities. Doing can take place in an unstructured environment such as a workplace or at home. For example, let's say you're shy and want to start speaking up. Try initiating one conversation a day at work or school, even if it's just to make a comment or talk about the weather. "The key is to start with something you can see yourself doing," says Kitagawa. "It might be simple, but then you build on those successes."
- Observing
Observe how others demonstrate high levels of competency in the skill. For example, watch others speaking out in a group or in class. How do they initiate or contribute to conversations?
- Reflecting
After doing and observing, reflect broadly on your experience. Compare your own skill performance with the performance of others, especially those who are more proficient. Consider how they have improved themselves in this skill and ask yourself how you might do the same.
- Assessing
Engage in a structured assessment of how you perform the skill. The best assessments involve a set of performance criteria that cover the range of actions, behaviours and attitudes that demonstrate proficiency in the skill
- Targeting
After assessing yourself, set skill development targets for self-improvement that will bring you to a higher level of proficiency. After small successes, think about what else you can see yourself doing. "The important thing is to take a bit of risk," says Kitagawa.
- Redoing
Take part in activities that require you to perform the skill you seek to improve at progressively higher levels of achievement. "If your goal is working on overcoming shyness, don't stop after speaking up in a discussion. Do it again, so you reinforce that behaviour," says Kitagawa.
- Repeating
After redoing, reflect on your most recent performance compared with others and assess yourself again. If you have not reached your skills achievement target, review your target and ask if it is realistic and achievable.
