A Transferable Skills Assessment That Won't Let You Rate Yourself 10

This kind of test looks at what you already do well and asks which of it would still count in a different job. A nurse who calms scared families, a teacher who plans a year of lessons, and a store manager who covers three missed shifts on a Saturday all use skills that no job description owns. The assessment finds those skills, ranks them, and points them at work outside your current field.

Transferable skills, defined in plain terms

Transferable skills are the abilities you can carry from one job to another without starting over. They are different from job-specific knowledge, like a coding language or a hospital's charting system, which mostly stays behind when you leave. O*NET, a free database of occupations kept by the federal government, sorts these portable abilities into cross-functional skills such as social skills, complex problem solving, and resource management. Most career guides group them into six families:

• Communication: explaining, writing, listening, persuading. Examples: writing a clear client update, running a meeting, calming an upset customer.
• Problem-solving: finding the cause of a problem and fixing it. Examples: tracing why orders keep arriving late, fixing a broken sign-up process, working around a missing supply.
• Leadership: setting direction and getting a group to follow it. Examples: training a new hire, leading a volunteer crew, settling a dispute between teammates.
• Organization: planning, scheduling, and keeping many parts moving. Examples: building a staff rota, running an event budget, keeping records in order for an audit.
• Analysis: reading numbers and patterns and drawing a sound conclusion. Examples: spotting a trend in sales figures, comparing vendor quotes, reading survey results.
• Creativity: coming up with ideas and making them into something. Examples: designing a lesson or workshop, writing a campaign idea, redesigning a cluttered form.

To see how these differ from technical abilities, see our guide to hard skills versus soft skills.

Why transferable skills matter more in a career change

When you change fields, your job title stops helping you. A hiring manager in a new industry cannot read "charge nurse" or "eighth grade science teacher" and know what you can do for them. What you bring across is the skill underneath the title. That is why these skills are the currency of a career change: they are the part of your past a new employer can use on day one. They also shape which moves make sense. Someone whose top skill is analysis has an easier path into operations or research than into sales, even if both are open.

Four ways people find their transferable skills, and where each falls short

People usually try one of four routes. A self-rated worksheet lists skills and has you score each one from 1 to 5. It is free and quick, but most people give themselves a 4 or 5 on nearly everything, so the ranking comes out flat. Asking coworkers gives you an outside view, but they only see you in one role. Reviewing past wins, by writing out your proudest projects and naming the skill behind each, is good practice but depends on memory. A scored assessment forces a trade between one skill and another, which is the one route that produces a ranking you did not choose on purpose. You get the most when you combine the last two: the test gives the ranking, and your own stories give the proof.

What a transferable skills test looks like inside

A transferable skills test is a set of questions scored to show which of your skills are strongest compared with each other. Pigment's version has about 120 questions. Every question offers two statements, and each one describes a natural way of working. One might read "I can see the weak step in a plan before it starts" and the other "I can get a room to agree on a plan." You mark the statement closer to how you work. You never mark both, and you never mark neither.

The test takes less than half an hour. You cannot prepare for it, and you cannot fail it. You are describing how you work, so a quick, gut-level pick tends to be more accurate than a long debate with yourself.

Why forced choice beats rating yourself

Think about how a 1 to 5 worksheet goes. "Communication": sure, a 4. "Problem-solving": also a 4. "Leadership": you ran a team once, so a 4. By the end, fifteen skills sit at 4 and the list tells you nothing new. Every skill on the page sounds good, and nothing on a 1 to 5 page stops you from claiming all of them.

A forced-choice format takes that option away. Because both statements in a pair describe a real way of working, picking one means ranking it above the other. After many of those trades, a clear order appears, and nobody can nudge it the way they nudge a page of 4s. The scoring also covers how you make decisions, how you learn, how you handle deadlines, and which work patterns sustain your energy or drain it.

The assessment methods employers trust, translated for you

If you have applied for jobs lately, you may have sat through tests without knowing what they were. Here is what the main types check, and what each one can tell you about your own skills:

• Situational judgment tests give you a work problem and ask which response is best. The federal hiring agency, OPM, describes how these judgment tests are built and scored. They show how you handle people and pressure, but employers keep the results.
• Cognitive ability tests time you on reasoning and number problems. OPM's page on cognitive ability tests explains what they predict. They measure how fast you reason, not which skills you use best.
• Work samples and skills tests check one hard skill, like Excel or typing. They prove a skill is there but cannot tell you it would carry into a new field.
• Forced-choice questionnaires rank your patterns against each other. They answer the question a career changer is asking: out of everything I do, what should I lead with?

To assess your own transferable skills, use a forced-choice test to get the ranking, then check the top items against real examples from your work.

Your 36-page report walks through each strength with ways to use it more, how you absorb and weigh information, the work types you lean toward, how you get along with colleagues whose style differs from yours, and a Career Alignment section that suggests roles to explore.

From ranked strengths to career matches

Here is an invented case to show how the pieces connect. Maria taught high school biology for twelve years. Her report puts her near the top on Coordination, Language, and Emotional Understanding, and places her in the Integrative and Influential work types: she combines people and ideas, and she is good at bringing others along. The report then points toward roles that lean on those same traits, such as learning and development, customer success, or program management. None of those roles say "teacher," but each one uses the thing she did every day.

Pigment also shows which work patterns sustain you and which drain you, next to your strongest skills. That matters in a career change. A skill you are strong in can still drain you if a new job asks for it all day, every day, and your results flag that before you apply.

Sample results (example only)

This is an invented excerpt based on Maria, to show the shape of the report. Your own results will differ.

Part of the report

Example result

Top 5 ranked strengths

1. Coordination · 2. Language · 3. Emotional Understanding · 4. Integration · 5. Structure Creation

Work type

Integrative, with Influential close behind

Suggested role: learning and development

Uses her planning of a full course and her skill at explaining ideas to adults.

Suggested role: customer success

Leans on reading how people feel and keeping many accounts moving at once.

Suggested role: program management

Draws on joining people, plans, and deadlines into one working whole.

Turning your results into resume lines

Your top strengths are the words you use on paper. Take each one and attach a proof from your past work, with a number where you can. Maria's "coordination" becomes "Planned and ran a year of lessons for 150 students across five class sections." Her "language" becomes "Wrote parent updates and course guides read by over 300 families a year." That is what transferable skills on a resume should look like: the skill in the new field's words, then the evidence. For more on the page itself, our career change resume guide walks through the layout. In interviews, use the same pairs, skill first, then a short story.

The ranking helps you most when you know you want out, or up, but cannot name the work you would do best next. Here is who tends to get the most from one, and what each group takes away:

• Career changers. For a career changer, the ranking turns ten years in one field into a ranked list another field can read. Our article on what carries over in a career change goes deeper on this.
• People who were laid off. You need to apply quickly and aim well. A ranking tells you which strengths to lead with in the first round of applications.
• PhDs leaving academia. If you are leaving a PhD, you probably undersell your own work, because research, teaching, and grant writing are rarely described in business terms. The report puts them in plain words.
• Parents returning to work. Years of running a household build organization and negotiation skills that a resume gap hides. Seeing them ranked makes them easier to claim.
• Veterans. Military roles build leadership and planning under pressure, but civilian employers often miss them behind the rank and job code.
• Early-career workers with a thin resume. When experience is short, knowing which skills are strongest helps you choose which small wins to write up.

Not sure yet that you want to change fields at all? If so, start with our career change self assessment, then come back here to plan the move.

The phrase "transferable skills" means three different things online, and each one calls for a different tool. Match your reason for searching to the right one.

When a skills checklist is enough, and when it isn't

A transferable skills checklist is a printed or online list of common skills, usually grouped into families, that you tick off or rate. Universities hand them out, and employers use their own version to review staff. A checklist is enough when you only need words for a resume and already know your strengths. It falls short when you are choosing a new direction, because a list you rate yourself cannot tell you which skills are strongest, and it does not point to any careers.

Formal transferable skills analysis for disability and workers' comp

If you arrived here because of a disability claim, an injury, or a workers' compensation case, you need something else. A transferable skills analysis in that setting is done by a vocational expert, who matches your past jobs and limits to other work you could still do. Social Security's rules on skill requirements and transferability set out how that decision is made. The result can affect benefits, so rely on a qualified vocational expert or your attorney, not an online test.

Picking which skills matter for the job you want

Start from the job, not from yourself. Pull three or four postings for the role you want and underline the skills that come up in all of them. Those are the ones to check. Then compare them with the top of your own ranking. Where they overlap, you have your pitch. Where the posting wants a skill near the bottom of your list, decide whether to build it or to aim at a nearby role. For a broader view of how skills connect to job direction, see our skills career assessment guide or our page on the soft skills assessment.

Take the Transferable Skills Assessment

If you are looking for a free transferable skills assessment online, a checklist will get you started. When you want to know which of your skills are strongest and which careers use them, Pigment is the next step. It ranks your strengths through forced choice, shows the type of work each strength points to, and names roles worth a look, with why they suit you. It was designed for you, the person answering, and it is not meant for employers choosing between candidates.

See Which of Your Skills Carry Over

Rank your strengths without rating yourself, then see the roles that use them, in your 36-page report. $79.99.

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