KTP Associate Blog

Good afternoon boys and girls, are we sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin…

One of the things that gets mentioned a lot within the KTP scheme are transferable skills, things you will be able to use outside of the the KTP in your everyday life. Things you will be able to use after the KTP if you stay on with the company. Things you will be able to use in any job you apply for in future years. But what are they, and how will you know when you have them?

These skills are things like; team working, report producing, general business knowledge, project planning, subject specific knowledge, being able to work on your own initiative. There are far to many of them to list here. A lot of these things you become so used to using that you do them without thinking.

The KTP modules are very good for giving you these skills, and offer a lot of practice in using them as I have already mentioned. Other things you get just from practice, doing something every day until you can do it without thinking about it.

For example, when applying to become a Special Constable, I had to sit the standard police exams and interview procedure. Nearly all of the questions I was asked involved where I had demonstrated certain key skills that they were looking for. 90% of my answers were drawn from my KTP experience and as a result I passed the interview with flying colours!

The diploma which you can gain from the residential modules is a major transferable thing, which will look good at any job interview, as well as the MPhil which I have just started to work towards. (40,000 words… why on earth did I say yes to that?!?)

All of these are very much ‘formal’ skills which you can quantify with examples, but you will also gain a lot of informal skills which are harder to give examples of. Communication for example, being able to get on with colleagues and customers is something which you will learn to do but is hard to prove.

All in all you will be able to cope in a variety of different situations, put the skills you use in your KTP to other uses and feel confident in doing it.

Tags: Written by Stuart Mills

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 11:36 am and is filed under Written by Stuart Mills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.