Transferable skills?
Much is often made of the value of transferable skills in late-stage career transition. So a recent post by Daisy Christodoulou in her Substack No More Marking pulled me up short. In What if transferable skills don’t exist?, she argues that the skills we value as “transferable” - creativity, problem solving, communication, and critical thinking - don’t exist in isolation. Instead, they are tied to domain-specific knowledge.
She writes,
“Whenever I write about this on social media, I get a lot of pushback - not just from people in education, but from people outside education. They will usually give an example from their own career to prove me wrong. Something like: ‘I spent the first twenty years of my career in one industry where I learned how to communicate, solve problems, and think creatively. Then I moved into a completely different industry and those skills stood me in excellent stead. How can you possibly say they didn’t transfer?’ My response is always the same. ‘What were the two industries?’”
How we recognise and address this has a real impact on how best to approach late-stage career transition – or indeed any career transition. Transfer works well when the domain overlaps.
It may be alluring to think that one day you might be a capital markets lawyer and the next a winemaker in a vineyard on the edge of the South Downs but such an idea is wholly unrealistic. This sort of switch requires rather more than the confidence that the communication and problem solving skills you learnt in Canary Wharf will seamlessly translate to Sussex. It isn’t just that the domain-specific knowledge is different; there will also need to be a lot of new learning and all that goes with it (see my Milestones Insight Learn, unlearn, relearn).
Some eight years ago, my report Reshaping Retirement - the result of detailed research on the life after law of 19 senior City of London lawyers - suggested that “. . . lawyers need to recognise that they have valuable skills in addition to the strictly technical skills that most lawyers have. They need to feel confident that such skills are transferable and they need to be able to articulate these other skills.” Well, yes and no. Today I would also stress the importance of that domain-specific knowledge. If there isn’t domain-overlap, you need to take into account how long any switch might take and what it might cost.