As a PhD or post-doc you get very used to thinking about yourself as a specialist within a specialism – for instance I studied within the Arts and Humanities Faculty, focussing on the history and popular culture of Medieval England. Very specialised!

But let’s zoom out a bit – in the course of your research, you’ve also acquired valuable transferable skills that are highly sought after by today’s employers. In fact by undertaking a broad range of activities during your PhD, you develop over 20 transferable skills, making you very hireable indeed.

Let’s take a look at the four main skill areas that a well-rounded doctoral graduate will have:

Project skills:
Project management
Managing budgets
Team working
Problem solving
Organising meetings and events

Entrepreneurship:
Thought leadership
Innovation
Bidding for funding
Networking
International experience

Communication skills:
Writing
Public speaking
Languages
Stakeholder management
Web, email, content creation and social media

Knowledge and information skills:
Research
Teaching and training
Managing data and information
IT applications and programming languages
Writing reports

Capturing the transferable skills you have is a different way of thinking about your capabilities compared with say how many academic papers you’ve published. Yet as you start to think about yourself in this way, it can be surprisingly liberating and empowering!

In my experience of working with groups of PhD researchers, there is often a ‘light-bulb moment’ as they appreciate the fantastic portfolio of transferable skills they possess. It helps them to make a connection with the mainstream world of work and understand how they can market themselves to employers – as a capable generalist or as a professional ‘________’ (fill in the blank), rather than as an academic specialist. Of course, if your subject is relevant to the jobs you’re interested in, so much the better, but for many jobs your subject is less important than your transferable skills.

Further reading – transferable skills

• Transferable skills and storytelling is a fantastic post by Julie Gould on using storytelling examples to identify your transferable PhD skills.

• 20 Transferable Skills For Biotech, Biomed, and Biopharma Industries is a free ebook which you can download from the Cheeky Scientist website.

This page was updated in January 2017 with improved further reading links. Many thanks to Dr Ioanna Iordanou for her helpful feedback on the original post.