Communicate Your Transferable Skills on Your LinkedIn Profile

Transferable skills are the value-based skills you bring from job to job. You want to articulate your value with your hard skills not your soft skills and highlight those through your LinkedIn profile and resume.

According to Work It Daily, “One of the ways of differentiating yourself from other job seekers is by having transferable skills.” And here are 5 skills they believe the job seeker should be articulating in a measurable way in the job search.

  • Communication
  • Analytical Skills
  • Leadership
  • Information Management Skills
  • Project Management

But it isn’t enough to just mention these, below you will learn how to quantify them which will give you the edge you want to get the interview.

Share the right skills to justify your cost

You are hired because you solve a problem for an employer. Be specific not a generalist, don’t dilute your effectiveness. You want to market your specifics not all those dozens of things you believe you have value in.

Your brand should demonstrate your specialty

Mistake: not selecting the ‘right ’transferable skills. Only show the ones that you would most be using from employer to employer

Choose skills that support your value. The most predominant skills are how you make a company money!
You want to attract the right employers that would hire your value.

Brand this on your LinkedIn profile and how you answer questions in an interview. Employers want to hire people who know their value.

Hard Skills Vs Soft Skills

Hard skills are quantifiable. Here are some examples:

  • Project Management
  • Digital marketing
  • Written Communications (quantified by what you have written)
  • Finance
  • Presentations
  • Operations

Attention to detail is a soft skill as is hard-working and these are opinions of yourself. Project management on the other hand is a hard skill which requires attention to detail and but what will sell you are the results from specific projects you managed.

Soft skills are not measurable and is simply a ‘nice to have’ from the perspective of a hiring manager, but know that you will be hired for your hard skills. So to determine what you want to highlight on your profile, resume and cover letter by asking yourself, can these skills be measured?

You will be call for an interview based on your hard skills, so when your LinkedIn profile is scanned by a recruiter you want to be sure your top hard skills are placed throughout your profile.

Where to place your hard skills in your LinkedIn profile

In my article on 6 Tips on Using LinkedIn to Find a Job, there are 4 things recruiters scan your profile for which you might want to go back and read. With an emphasis on hard skills, pay attention to these areas:

Transferable skills must be front and center on your LinkedIn profile and I suggest placing them in these areas to validate what you most want to be known for.

    1. Your brand headline (1-2 keywords that are hard skills) ie; Project Manager
    2. Your About section (bullet point out your key hard skills)
    3. Specifically bullet point out examples of the top three transferable skills used in your last job.
    4. Ask for recommendations where your hard skills are mentioned by an authority figure, someone who speaks directly to those top skills. This gives you immediate credibility for those skills.
    5. Skills & Endorsement section

Highlighting the skills for the job you want

Recruiters can screen you out of a job as well as get you an interview. They screen for the criteria they are hiring for.
You want to make it easy for recruiters to screen you in,

You will get found more on LinkedIn when you know the skills/key words comes up in the search results.

Perhaps you are a Visionary, you are great at presenting ideas, motivating people to align with the company vision. But what are the hard skills that would go along with being a visionary?

Perhaps you were in customer service – how many people did you talk to in a day and did you receive satisfaction ratings-name it.

These are the things you may have done within your position now you want to flush these out: reporting, analysis, project management, managed operations.

Hard skills will give recruiters a reason to reach out to you and hopefully they want to lean more about your personality and thus your soft skills. Filling up your LinkedIn profile with soft skills won’t get the interview!

Conclusion

Always demonstrate your skills with examples that are quantifiable. Recruiters can only make a decision based on facts not on opinions. By taking the time to flush out specifically what you have done to support mentioning that skill, it should pay-off in getting an interview so the company can learn more about you. Regardless if the job description mentions soft skills to sell you on the idea of working at their company, you want to be sure to focus on the hard skills first that you pull out of the job description.

Use LinkedIn to Find A Job

For more strategies on How to Find a Job Using LinkedIn, download our FREE Insider’s Guide on What Job Seekers Need to Know to Get Hired in 2020.

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JoAnne Funch

Helping business owners and corporate leaders use LinkedIn and relationship building strategies to gain more exposure for their brand so they have more impact, credibility & income.

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