When people consider changing career, they often focus on what they have not done before.
“I have never worked in that sector.”
“I do not have that job title.”
“My experience is too specialised.”
I understand that concern, but my own career has taught me to look at experience differently.
I joined the British Army at 16 and served for ten years, including involvement in a number of operational deployments. After leaving, I moved into business and technology, started a consultancy in 1996 and spent decades working across enterprise technology, entrepreneurship and professional services. Later I moved into professional mentoring, coaching and speaking.
Those environments are very different. The useful skills underneath them are often more transferable than they first appear.
Job titles can hide the real skill
A job title tells people where you used a skill. It does not always tell them what the skill is.
Someone may have been a technical architect, but underneath that title they may have been analysing complex situations, explaining difficult ideas, coordinating stakeholders, assessing risk and making decisions with incomplete information.
Someone may have managed a team, but the deeper skills may include developing people, handling conflict, setting priorities and keeping people focused during change.
Someone may have run a small business and therefore developed sales, negotiation, cash awareness, customer service, resilience and problem solving without ever holding formal titles for any of them.
Look for the capability beneath the context
When I moved between very different professional environments, I did not start again from nothing.
The context changed. The capability travelled.
Preparation mattered in the military. It mattered in technology. It matters in speaking and mentoring.
Clear communication mattered in operational environments. It matters when explaining technology to a board and when helping a client think through a decision.
Accountability mattered in teams. It matters in business.
The ability to remain focused when circumstances change has been useful everywhere.
Problem solving transfers particularly well
Many roles are, at their core, forms of problem solving.
The subject changes, but the process can be similar:
- understand what is actually happening;
- separate fact from assumption;
- identify constraints;
- consider options;
- make a decision;
- review what happened and adjust.
That way of thinking can be valuable in technology, leadership, business and career decisions.
Communication is usually more transferable than people realise
People often describe communication as a soft skill. In many careers, it is a hard requirement.
Can you explain complexity simply? Can you listen properly? Can you ask a useful question? Can you adapt the message to the audience? Can you tell somebody something they may not want to hear without making the conversation worse?
Those abilities travel.
They also become more important as you move into leadership, mentoring, coaching or advisory work, where the value is often not only in what you know but in whether another person can understand and use it.
Do not overclaim transferability
Transferable skills do not mean every transition is automatic.
Some professions require specific technical knowledge, qualifications, licences or supervised experience. A strong communicator does not become a qualified professional simply because communication transfers.
Career change requires honesty about both sides of the equation:
What can I carry forward, and what do I genuinely need to learn?
That is a much stronger position than either undervaluing everything you have done or assuming experience in one field makes you immediately competent in another.
Your unusual combination may be your advantage
People sometimes try to make their career story look more conventional than it really is.
I think the opposite can be useful.
A combination of military experience, technology, entrepreneurship, law, mentoring, coaching and speaking is not a straight line. But that combination creates a perspective I would not have developed through a single career path.
Your own combination may do the same.
What looks disconnected on a CV can become a coherent professional story when you understand the thread running through it.
Ask other people what they see
One difficulty with transferable skills is that we often stop noticing what we do well.
If you have solved the same type of problem for twenty years, it may feel ordinary to you.
Ask trusted colleagues, clients or mentors:
- What do you come to me for?
- What do I make look easier than it is?
- Where have you seen me add the most value?
- What skills do you think I use across different situations?
The answers can reveal strengths you have been treating as background noise.
Translate your experience for the new audience
A transferable skill is only useful in a career move if the other person can see the connection.
Do not expect a recruiter, client or new industry to translate it for you.
Instead of only saying what you did, explain the capability and the result.
For example, replace a list of technical responsibilities with evidence that you led complex change, influenced senior stakeholders, reduced risk or coordinated delivery across multiple teams.
The aim is not to exaggerate. It is to make the value visible.
A practical transferable-skills exercise
Choose three significant roles from your career and answer four questions for each:
- What problems did I regularly solve?
- What did people rely on me for?
- Which skills appeared in more than one role?
- Where else could those same skills create value?
You are looking for patterns, not perfect wording.
Conclusion
Career change becomes less intimidating when you stop treating your previous experience as something you have to leave behind.
Practical takeaway: Look beneath your last three job titles and identify the five capabilities that have followed you from one environment to another.
If you are considering a career change or need help translating your experience into a new direction, see Career & Professional Development.
Archive note: This Insight draws on my experience moving between military service, technology, business, mentoring and coaching and has been edited and expanded for the current website.