When I work with executives who are considering a career change, one of the first things I notice is how much their job title can influence the way other people see them.
Someone may have spent years leading transformations, developing people, implementing technology, influencing strategy, integrating acquisitions, or solving problems across multiple functions. Yet when that person wants to move into a different role or industry, the title becomes shorthand for what others assume they know how to do.
The same thing happens inside organizations.
We become accustomed to thinking of someone as the operations person, the finance person, the HR person, or the marketing person. Eventually, the role they hold can become the boundary around what we imagine they could do next.
But a job title tells us where someone sits in an organization. It doesn’t necessarily tell us the full extent of what that person has learned, contributed, or could be capable of doing next.
Transferable Skills Often Develop Before the Job Title Does
In the first article in this series, Education and Career Development: What My Degrees Didn’t Teach Me, I wrote about wanting to move from administrative work into training and development.
I didn’t have the title or direct experience employers were looking for, so I started volunteering for training initiatives and helping develop learning experiences within my department.
Those opportunities allowed me to build experience that wasn’t obvious from my job title.
Looking back, that seems fairly straightforward. At the time, it wasn’t. I knew I could contribute in a different way, but I needed opportunities to demonstrate it.
I see the same issue with executives today, particularly when they’re changing functions or industries. An operations executive may also have significant experience with technology implementation, organizational change, financial management, talent development, and customer experience. A marketing executive may have influenced product strategy, pricing, sales effectiveness, or revenue growth. A finance executive may have led post-acquisition integration, operating-model changes, technology implementations, or enterprise transformation.
Those capabilities didn’t suddenly appear when the executive decided to pursue a different role. They were developed through the work that person had already been doing.
The challenge is making them visible.
Why Executive Career Transitions Can Be Difficult
When someone has spent 15 or 20 years progressing within one function, employers have a lot of evidence about what that person has already done. That can be an advantage until the executive wants to do something different. Now the hiring organization has to make a connection between past experience and future value. Executives sometimes assume that connection will be obvious. It usually isn’t.
I’ve written about this before in The Hidden Reason Executives Get Overlooked. There can be a significant difference between what an executive has actually done and how quickly someone reviewing that background understands its relevance.
That becomes even more important during a career transition.
If your résumé spends most of its space describing what you were responsible for, the reader may understand your previous jobs perfectly and still not understand why you’re qualified for the one you’re pursuing.
The same applies to LinkedIn and interviews. Saying that you have “transferable skills” isn’t enough. You need evidence showing where you’ve already used those capabilities and what happened because of them.
For example, an executive pursuing a transformation role doesn’t necessarily need to have held the title “Chief Transformation Officer” to demonstrate transformation leadership.
Perhaps that person:
– Reorganized a business unit after an acquisition.
– Implemented technology that changed how several functions operated.
– Redesigned an operating model to support rapid growth.
– Consolidated teams or functions across multiple locations.
– Led employees through a significant organizational change.
Those experiences provide evidence. The career positioning work is connecting that evidence to what the next organization needs.
Employers Are Looking at Skills and Experience, Too
This isn’t only a positioning issue for job seekers. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 81% of surveyed employers expect to continue using work experience to assess candidates between 2025 and 2030. Skills assessments were cited by 48%, while 43% expected to continue using university degrees as a requirement. World Economic Forum
I don’t interpret that to mean education no longer matters. Many roles still require degrees, credentials, or specialized knowledge. What I find more interesting is the emphasis on demonstrated experience. For someone trying to make a career transition, that makes the question less about whether your previous title matches the next one and more about whether you can show evidence that you’ve already developed the capabilities the new role requires.
It also raises an important question for employers: Are they looking broadly enough to recognize that evidence?
Internal Mobility Has the Same Problem
There is another side to this issue that I think deserves more attention. Organizations may already employ people who are capable of doing more, but their hiring and promotion processes don’t always make those capabilities easy to recognize. Think about what happens when an internal position opens. The organization identifies the qualifications. Candidates are evaluated against them. Someone who has already held a similar position may appear to be the safest choice. That’s understandable. But if previous job titles become the primary evidence of future capability, organizations can create an interesting problem: How does someone ever get the first opportunity to do something different?
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that internal mobility was becoming a higher priority for 55% of the organizations it classified as “career development champions,” compared with 48% of other respondents. LinkedIn specifically points to internal mobility as a way organizations can move transferable skills and cross-functional knowledge throughout the business. LinkedIn Learning
This is where transferable skills and demonstrated potential become important. If a position requires someone who can lead organizational change, I wouldn’t look only for someone who has held a formal change-management role.
I’d want to know:
– Has this person successfully led people through a significant transition?
– Have they gained support for an initiative that initially faced resistance?
– Have they brought different functions together around a shared objective?
– Have they implemented a new technology, process, or operating model?
– Can they point to results from that work?
Those questions focus on evidence rather than labels.
Stretch Assignments Can Reveal What a Résumé Can’t
One reason my early training opportunities mattered so much was that someone allowed me to do work beyond my formal responsibilities. That’s how people develop. A stretch assignment, cross-functional initiative, temporary leadership responsibility, special project, or exposure to another part of the business can reveal capabilities that would otherwise remain hidden. It also gives employees something extremely valuable: evidence. Instead of saying, “I think I could do that,” they can eventually say, “Here’s where I’ve already done something similar.”
I’ve written previously about what I call the promotion gap, when someone’s responsibilities and organizational impact have already expanded beyond the level suggested by the title. That’s another reason leaders should pay attention to what people are actually doing, not simply where they sit on the organizational chart.
For organizations, that can make internal mobility less dependent on speculation. It can also help leaders identify employees whose potential isn’t obvious from the organizational chart. The person who keeps getting asked to solve difficult problems may be demonstrating something. So may the employee who becomes the informal bridge between departments, the manager who develops people who consistently get promoted, or the leader who is repeatedly asked to take on troubled initiatives. Those patterns are worth paying attention to.
Are Organizations Looking for Potential or Previous Titles?
I don’t think this means organizations should disregard experience requirements. Some positions require technical expertise, regulatory knowledge, credentials, or depth of experience that can’t simply be transferred from another function. A genuine qualification gap is still a gap. But there is an important difference between asking whether someone has the capabilities required to succeed and asking whether someone has already held the same title somewhere else. The second question creates a much narrower talent pool.
For organizations concerned about succession planning, leadership development, and retention, that distinction matters. If employees believe the only way to move forward is to leave the company and get experience somewhere else, some of them will. And the organization may eventually recruit externally for capabilities that were already developing inside its own workforce.
This matters for retention as well as succession planning. LinkedIn’s research found that employees are receiving less career-development support from managers than they were a year earlier. Only 15% of the learners surveyed said their manager had helped them build a career plan during the previous six months, down five percentage points from 2024. LinkedIn Learning.
If people don’t see a path to grow inside the organization, some will eventually look for one elsewhere. And the organization may find itself recruiting externally for capabilities that were already developing inside its own workforce.
How to Identify Your Own Transferable Skills
For professionals considering a career transition, start with the problems the target role needs someone to solve rather than beginning with your current title. Then look backward through your experience.
For each requirement, ask yourself three questions:
Where have I done something similar? It doesn’t have to have occurred in the same function or industry.
What evidence do I have? Look for measurable results, decisions you influenced, problems you solved, teams you led, or changes you implemented.
Can I explain the connection clearly? Don’t expect the person reading your résumé or interviewing you to figure it out.
A simple exercise is to create three columns:
What the target role requires | Where I’ve demonstrated it | Evidence of the result
That last column matters.
“Strategic thinker” is a claim. Developing a market-entry strategy that generated measurable revenue is evidence.
“Change leader” is a claim. Leading the integration of multiple business units following an acquisition is evidence.
Your transferable skills become much more credible when they’re attached to something you’ve actually done.
Leaders Should Be Asking Similar Questions
There’s a corresponding exercise for executives responsible for developing people. Look at someone on your team who has been performing well and ask:
What is this person demonstrating that isn’t part of the formal job description?
Then consider whether there is an opportunity to test that capability. It might be a project, committee, presentation to senior leadership, temporary assignment, cross-functional initiative, or responsibility for developing someone else. Not every stretch assignment will reveal a future executive, and not every employee wants a larger role. But you learn much more about someone’s potential by giving them an opportunity to demonstrate it than you do by looking at their title.
What Happens When the Opportunities to Learn Begin to Change?
This brings me to the final part of this series. People develop transferable skills because they’re given opportunities to do work they haven’t done before. They observe more experienced colleagues. They take on smaller assignments. They make mistakes when the consequences are manageable. Eventually, they’re trusted with something bigger. But some of the work traditionally given to employees early in their careers is also the work organizations are beginning to automate or augment with AI. That creates a question I don’t think organizations can afford to ignore:
If AI changes the first rung of the career ladder, how will people gain the experience they need to reach the next one?
That’s where I’ll go in Part 3.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are transferable skills in an executive career transition?
Transferable skills are capabilities developed in one role, function, or industry that can be applied in another. For executives, these might include transformation leadership, strategic planning, financial management, talent development, technology implementation, stakeholder influence, or post-acquisition integration. The strongest case for transferability includes specific evidence showing where the capability was demonstrated and what resulted from it.
How can executives demonstrate transferable skills on a résumé?
Connect each transferable capability to an accomplishment rather than simply listing the skill. Show the business problem, what you did, the scope of your involvement, and the result. This helps the reader understand how your previous experience relates to the position you’re pursuing.
What is internal mobility?
Internal mobility refers to employees moving into new positions, functions, projects, or levels of responsibility within the same organization. It can include promotions, lateral moves, cross-functional assignments, and opportunities to develop capabilities outside an employee’s current position.
How can organizations identify employees with leadership potential?
Job performance is one source of information, but leaders can also look for patterns beyond formal responsibilities. Employees who are repeatedly trusted with difficult problems, bring teams together, develop other people, influence across functions, or succeed in stretch assignments may be demonstrating capabilities relevant to future leadership opportunities.
Why are stretch assignments important for career development?
Stretch assignments give employees an opportunity to perform work beyond their current responsibilities. They can help employees develop new capabilities while giving the organization evidence of how that person performs when faced with greater complexity, unfamiliar problems, or expanded responsibility.
This is Part 2 of my three-part series on education, career opportunity, and developing future leaders.
Part 1: Education and Career Development: What My Degrees Didn’t Teach Me
Coming in Part 3: If AI Changes the First Rung of the Career Ladder, Where Do Future Leaders Start?