Identify your transferable skills to streamline your learning

Petra says: “You can learn basically anything by identifying your transferable skills first.”

What are you transferring your skills to?

“We’ve always known that SEO is a field that constantly changes, and recently that change is even more fast-paced. When we look at job descriptions, they seem to include new required skills almost every month. Keeping up with that learning can be really daunting.

However, if you identify your transferable skills, a lot of those new skills can be learned much easier and much more efficiently through them.

I have a nice analogy for this. Imagine your skills as air traffic and your transferable skills as an air traffic hub like London. You might already have flights going from London to Paris, and from London to Denver. However, you might not have a direct connection from Denver to Paris. To build that out is a lot of effort, but you can make that connection using your hub.

If you identify those transferable skills, you might find that you already have skills and learnings from other projects and experiences that you can utilise for the future.

In SEO, technical literacy is an important skill. When GA4 popped up, people were nervous about having to learn it because we were so used to Universal Analytics, and it seemed like a really new thing. However, we learn new tools and read through the documentation for new algorithm updates all the time. Pretty much every SEO has the technical literacy that is required to learn new technologies.

If you can identify that as a skill that you have, you can think about how you usually approach learning a new platform or a new tool. Perhaps you first identify the purpose of it. If it’s an analytics platform, are you trying to see what you can create as an end product or are you trying to identify whether the data points and dimensions are different, so you can’t cluster your data the same way you did before?

Once you identify what usually works for you, you can apply that to learning any new skill that pops up, or any new technology. In this case, the transferable skill is the technological literacy that you have.”

Is this advice for people trying to stay in their role and evolve or people looking for new opportunities?

“It can be for evolving in your current job and trying to get a pay rise or a promotion, but if you’re moving between jobs, new skills are always required. That’s the story with SEO.

It doesn’t matter if you’re changing jobs or not; your job will change anyway. You could stay in the same role, and you will still be required to learn new things – and learning anything new takes time and it takes effort.

What’s key is making that into something that’s time-efficient and easy to do. Identifying the projects you’ve already worked on and what kinds of transferable skills you used can be really beneficial for that future learning.”

How do you know what learning will be useful in the future?

“The beauty of transferable skills is that they apply in different areas. Technical literacy is a skill, but so are critical thinking and research. You need to think of skills that are broader. They could be things that you learned at university, or research skills you learned at your job.

People skills are also transferable skills – whether that’s communication, listening, empathy, or storytelling. Any of these can be applied to future jobs because you will be working with people to an extent, even though we also work with AI, bots, and all of those things.

At the end of the day, all of these skills will help you. If you’re struggling with that, you can always go online and look at a list of the different types of skills – critical thinking, people skills, research skills, technical literacy, curiosity, creativity, etc. All of these things are transferable. Take that list and try to identify where you have utilised those skills already.

That can be really helpful because then you’re not just thinking that you led a project on site migration, or you’re good at using crawling tools. You can still talk about it that way, but you can also talk about project management, keeping in touch with stakeholders and managing relationships, technical literacy, critical thinking, solving challenges, etc. Once you start changing the way that you look at your experience and how you learn from it, it will be much easier to apply it in the future.

You may even need good people skills to be able to speak to AI in the future. It is a natural language model, so the better you learn to communicate with it, the better it gets. Using emotional language with AI can affect the results that you get. If you say ‘please’ it might be more likely to give better results, or if you say that you have an exam tomorrow and give it a sense of urgency it can be more direct or efficient.

It learns how we speak to each other and the responses that we give when someone uses emotional language like that, so those people skills can be crucial when you’re prompting AI.”

Is it important to tailor the transferable skills that you try to master based on your own personality?

“A lot of identifying transferable skills is about self-reflection and understanding what you do best. That can also inform what kind of job you want for yourself in the future. New jobs and new job descriptions will keep popping up, but what do you want to apply for? Where do you want to take your career? This can help with that as well.

With most transferable skills, we might not be the best at them, but we all learn them through life, to an extent. Of course, you need to identify which of those skills suit you best, which can really help your career. A really big part of that is self-reflection.

Learning is really hard. We all have self-limiting beliefs where a new skill comes up and we don’t know if we can learn it, or we don’t know if we’re good at it. However, if you know some of your strengths and try to approach it that way, then those self-limiting beliefs can become self-fulfilling beliefs because you start doing it and it does become easier. You will realise that you can actually learn this new skill, which goes back to mindset as well.

I’m studying neuroscience and the idea of neuroplasticity is becoming quite popular, which is the fact that, through learning, our brains form new synaptic connections all the time. We learn throughout our entire lives. For a long time, people thought that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but that’s not true.

Of course, I’m not saying you learn the same way as you learned when you were 18 or 20, but it’s absolutely possible – and a lot of that depends on your mindset. Biologically, we are all capable. Your brain is learning and changing all the time anyway. How you want to optimize that process is up to you.”

How do you stay motivated to keep on learning?

“I don’t think you can force motivation. This is a personal opinion, but I think you need to use the motivation you already have. When you’re motivated, you can plan.

When you’re motivated to learn all of these new things, instead of just making a list of the things that you want to learn, plan it out. Make a plan for how you’re going to do it, and when you are going to do it. Use the motivation when you have it and on the things you are motivated for.

Also, use that motivation to self-reflect about why you are motivated to do this. What purpose is driving you? Can you apply that to other aspects of your life? If you’re trying to force yourself to be motivated, the two concepts go against each other.”

If you’re a Head of SEO in an organisation and you’re recruiting a team, how do you interview for someone who is continuously learning?

“From the perspective of someone who’s applying for a role, make sure to include those transferable skills on your CV. If you include them, that can prompt the recruiter to ask about them as well.

From the hiring perspective, what I’ve learned from the really good managers and leaders I’ve worked with, you hire for potential instead of skills. Instead of asking, ‘You’ve worked with this tool, what did you use it for?’, ask a question like, ‘If an issue comes up, talk me through how you are going to solve it?’

When I was applying for my first SEO job, I was still very junior, but I talked about how I would Google things and go on different publications, and the resources I would look for if I didn’t know something. That question is always good for recruiters: ‘If you don’t know something, and there is this problem, how are you going to solve it? Talk me through it.’

Hire for the potential and for curiosity. Asking people what motivates them and what makes them curious can give more of an insight into whether they are going to be able to motivate themselves. Do they have interests that align with where the company’s heading, or how the manager motivates their team?

Often, it’s not about the company, it’s about the relationship that you can have with your manager and whether that person can keep the curiosity and motivation alive within the team.”

Is there a particular learning style that makes it more likely that you will absorb the learning?

“I was just doing a study on neuroeducation, and learning styles (visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic) are a complete myth. If you think that you are one type of learner, that is not a thing. It’s a myth that’s very popular for good reason, though, because it has been used in education and produced good results.

It’s contradictory because it’s a myth, but it produced good results, so researchers started to look into why that is. It turns out that it can produce good results because, when teachers start to teach through multimodality, that is really helpful.

Therefore, when you approach learning, don’t just say that you’re a visual learner so you’re only going to watch videos. Look for different resources because multimodality can really work. Write it down, look for something visual, and listen to a podcast about it to make sure that there are different processes.

There is a theory that different subjects work better in certain modalities, but it’s not that people have their own learning styles that work for them. It’s more that a diversity of styles can be really helpful.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop making a list of the 500 new skills you want to learn and the 10 courses you want to sign up for, but never do.

Stop planning the learning and start identifying what you know already, how you can improve that, and how you can learn through it.”

Petra Kis-Herczegh is an Independent Consultant and Trainer, and you can find her over at KameleonJournal.com.