3 Kinds of Skills You Must Bring to the Job in 2025: Be ready for change!

The latest trend in employee selection, I’ve been told, is “skills-based hiring.” Employers conduct LinkedIn searches, ATS searches, and then formulate their interview questions around the skills they are seeking in a candidate. Career management coaches describe these skills as:

1. Job-specific: Technical skills, often referred to as “hard skills” that are gained through education, training, and hands-on experience.
2. Transferable: Skills such as problem-solving and organization that you may bring from unrelated jobs.
3. Interpersonal: This category includes skills such as communication and collaboration. Career coaches and HR specialists often refer to these as “soft skills” or “leadership skills.”

Both you and the employer should verify that your skills match. Neither of you will be happy when there is a mismatch. As a result, you will probably be hunting for yet another job in very short order.

Technical Skills

The competencies you should have to perform a specific job are often referred to as technical skills. You probably listed a dozen or more technical skills in the core competencies section of your resume, and then included up to 100 skills on your LinkedIn profile. And your prospective employer may have selected you for an interview because they searched LinkedIn, or their ATS database, for candidates with the job-specific competencies you listed.

Now, you may want to prepare for a detailed discussion of some specific skills. Identify at least five job-specific skills that are required for the position you are seeking. The best source for this information is the job description or job posting. If you do not have the job posting or position description, there are two excellent federal government sources for the information. These include O*NET and the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Technical skills are the competencies required for your job function and profession. For example, the top five skills a business analyst prepared to discuss at her interviews included business process improvement, functional documentation, requirements elicitation, solution design, and system implementation.

While the core competencies in this example are IT related, many core competencies, such as the ability to perform legal or financial research and analysis are not related closely to technology. (Although automated tools may be used)

Job-specific competencies can be demonstrated through objective tests. It’s a good idea to only discuss skills that you would pass a professional-level exam on if asked to do so.

Pro-tip: Do not confuse “technical skills” with “technology skills.” Basic technology skills, including your ability to use productivity software such as MS-Word and Excel are expected in nearly every job today, just as literacy in your native language is expected.

Transferrable Skills

Transferrable skills are competencies that are not necessarily related to your current job. They can be either technical competencies or leadership and interpersonal skills.

Career-changers may want to emphasize transferrable skills. For example, a client used the cost-cutting skills she honed as a fashion buyer to reduce expenses as an accounts payable manager in the construction industry.

Your transferrable skills can lead to work or business opportunities in entirely new fields, or even historic breakthroughs. Historian David McCullough, for example, says in his book, The Wright Brothers, that the brothers—bicycle mechanics by trade—may have succeeded in building a practical airplane where engineers and physicists failed because they understood balance and equilibrium from their bicycle work. Also, the brothers understood the value of practice and spent much more time in the air than their competitors. In other words, the Wright brothers used their transferrable skills to start new careers—and change the world in the process!

Interpersonal Skills

Coaches and hiring teams consider interpersonal skills—also referred to as people skills and leadership skills—essential. A few examples provided by Dr. Elnora Tena Webb, a leadership coach, include effective communications, reliability, authenticity, integrity, and honesty. You’ll find a more detailed discussion of my talk with Dr. Webb in a previous post.

Employers don’t search their databases for job candidates who say on their resume that they have honesty and integrity because nearly every resume in the system would come up. You have to demonstrate these skills and characteristics in all your business dealings and be prepared to explain how your honesty and integrity resulted in greater customer trust and a healthier bottom line for your company.

Fortunately, behavioral scientists have found that certain soft skills or leadership skills match well with specific kinds of jobs. For example, if you are “conscientious,” you will fit well into jobs where following rules and norms is important. Many career management coaches offer surveys such as DISC Styles that you can use to show employers your matching soft skills. This is more powerful than simply asserting your soft skills.

Concluding Comments

Few of us are going to change the world when we apply our transferrable skills to a new job or career. But, we can change our own future when we apply for jobs that match our skills, and convince prospective employers that we have made the correct match.