Yes, you do!
Everybody does. You might feel like you don’t have the experience or specific skillset for the career you would like to pursue, but this is never entirely true. Throughout your life, you’ve had experiences that shaped you into who you are today.
We want to show you how all those experiences have given you a unique combination of skills that you can apply to other jobs, even an online job.
In the Workstyling Skills Analysis we don’t only consider the obvious skills. It’s not just about the skills listed on your resumé or those related to your college degree, it’s about all the things you learned from your past experiences. If you look close enough you’ll realize you have all sorts of transferable skills which can be useful to creating your ideal online job.
A job, after all, it’s not just a two-word definition on your resumé, or on your LinkedIn profile. A job is something you do every single day, it’s a series of habits, actions, tasks that fill your days.
Why can’t those tasks, those abilities, those things you learn in one job be transferred to another?
To show you what we mean, we have collected examples from our careers.
Was I a teacher or a storyteller?
Gaby worked for many years as a Business English and Cultural Trainer in various countries. When you are in a classroom, you need to keep the attention of your students and the best way to do so is coming up with interesting and engaging stories that teach them something.
Fast forward a few years and Gaby creates a coaching business: what’s the best way to promote it and grow it? Content marketing, for example writing blog posts. Gaby had never written a blog before, she never had a website, let alone a blog. But she was a teacher who used to tell stories that had to be interesting and engaging. She realized she could transfer her skill of a storyteller to a completely different setting, instead of telling stories she wrote them down and turned them into blogs to engage her readers and potential clients.
It might take some practice to get it right, but I have those skills and I can use them for something else. That’s what we are talking about when we talk about transferable skills and identifying the skills that you already have, even if you are not an expert. – Gaby Kamp
What’s the difference between selling cars and selling websites?
When Anne moved to Austin Texas, she was looking for a 
summer job that took her far away from a laptop screen. Through a mysterious Craigslist ad, she ended up working as a car salesperson. During that hot Texan summer, she acquired plenty of skills that would be useful for her future freelancing career as a web developer (among other things!). What were some skills that she was able to transfer? For starters, marketing and sales! Some people are naturally good at it, but everyone needs to learn the basics. As well as the value of networking and building trust which is fundamental both offline and online. Anne talks about this job and other unlikely side gigs in this blog post.
“I’ve used the sales skills I learned to land freelance gigs and even bartered in other situations to get what I wanted (like room and board in exchange for work)” – Anne Dorko
Managing time and managing freedom
Being a student means having the freedom to choose how you organize your days. 
Studying for the next exam vs. binge-watching the latest tv show. Skipping a lesson vs. skipping the meeting of the student organization. Working part-time vs. having more time to spend in the library. Roberta’s university time was full of decisions and questions, probably much like yours. She was juggling several commitments at the time, a job, an important role in a student organization, friends, parties, travels, and… well, lessons and studying too!
Kind of similar to the life of a freelancer, right? When you work online, you have the freedom to build your days as you wish. You can wake up late, have long breaks, go for coffee with your friends, spend time outside. But you also have deadlines and appointments. And client calls and more deadlines. Time management skills are extremely valuable when freedom is involved.
“When I started working online, I realized how similar the freedom of this lifestyle was to my beloved student life (and one of the things I missed most in the 9-to-5 jobs). I could finally use the time management skills I had learned during that busy time to optimize this freedom and get the best out of it!” – Roberta Buoite Stella
Now that you’ve read our stories about how we transferred our skills to our online jobs, it’s your turn! Share with us an experience you had that helped you in a completely different setting and lead to a transferable skill you could use in other jobs.
If you are looking to understand the skills you have and how they can help you land your ideal online job, check out this video for a breakdown of the 5 most important steps you have to take to get there.