7 Identify Transferable Skills

Your portfolio is an excellent tool to communicate the skills you have gained as a tutor to future employers. While your future work may or may not directly focus on tutoring or teaching, your tutoring work has allowed you to develop many highly valued abilities, including:

• The ability to manage high expectations from students, staff, and faculty
• The ability to set goals and help others make measurable improvements in their skills
• Flexibility and adaptability to meet the needs of various learners
• Communication skills: active listening
• The ability to motivate others and manage conflict
• The ability to build strong and trusting relationships with tutees

While all of your tasks as a tutor may not be directly transferable to the next steps on your career journey, you have gained many transferable skills that you bring with you.

Transferable Skill: Tasks are the actual job functions that you performed and will most likely not be applicable to the new employer. Instead it is the skill you learned from doing the task that is of importance. This skill is what is called a transferable skill.

Skill: The capability to carry out pre-determined outcomes often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both.

Hard Skill: Specific, teachable abilities that can be defined and measured. For example: typing, writing, math, reading and the ability to use software programs.

Soft Skill: The cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people

(Adapted from Michele Matthysen, 2017)

Identify the skills you have gained as a KPU Tutor:

Which of these skills would you identify as transferable skills?

How will you use a portfolio to communicate about your skills as a tutor?