Have you ever found yourself staring at your resume, unsure of what to write? Perhaps you are like me: flustered and irritated, wondering how you could possibly incorporate your beloved hobby of collecting global currency and turtle souvenirs into your resume.
Perhaps you are working on your summer applications, hoping to find a job more in your field, but you can’t quite draw a connection from your past experience as a babysitter for your aunt to your dream summer job as an economic development intern.
Perhaps you are just looking for a way to incorporate your hobby on your resume, because, well, you think it’s stupendous, but you just can’t find a way to draw transferable skills from it.
Don’t worry – we’ve been there. However, you must remember that all hobbies have some transferable skills that can be drawn from them.
Below I have listed some of the most common hobbies and their accompanying transferable skills. Feel free to describe your hobbies in more detail in interviews, and use this base to draw connections to your own hobbies or other experience not listed here.
- Reading: Creativity, critical thinking, and development of a large vocabulary, which can lead to excellent written communication skills.
- Travelling: Critically researching, organizing and deciding on a course of action.
- Video gaming: Planning, patience, and focus. If playing in a team, teamwork and collaboration are essential.
- Exercising: Often personal development goals are set and met, requiring exceptional time-management, passion, commitment and patience.
- Cooking: Problem-solving, organization, expression of ideas, prioritization and more are displayed when cooking, but even more so when cooking under pressure.
- Writing: Creativity, researching, planning, editing, organization, time management, and more. Marketing and sales can even be displayed if you work to encourage the purchase of your book.
- Dancing: Attention to detail, motivating others, perseverance, resilience, and confidence, as well as teamwork, in some cases.
- Music: Setting deadlines and goals, and meeting them, cognitive flexibility, planning, and often collaboration.
- Collecting: Dedication, organization, record keeping, detail orientation and analyzing information.
- Playing sports: Making quick decisions, implementing them, and accepting the consequences, communication skills, critical thinking, and strong work ethic. Teamwork is often necessary as well.
These hobbies can display important skills, but your experience can too. Don’t forget to add other key information to your resume as well. These skills can help you land a job, but you have to be sure to apply them every day of your working career. I hope these transferrable skills examples can be applied to your hobbies, so you will never again underestimate the power of a good coin collection and reading recreationally.