Transferable Skills for Your Social-Impact Job Search

Has the pandemic motivated you to leave your corporate job in search of a role in the social-impact space? The good news is, you don’t have to reinvent your career to switch sectors. Many skills required to be successful in a corporate setting are the same skills needed to excel at a nonprofit organization.

For those interested in admin jobs specifically, we're highlighting key skills to include in your application materials that can help you make an impact at a nonprofit:

Strong organizational skills

Organizational skills are crucial in administrative roles. Often, these jobs are tasked with managing schedules, prioritizing tasks, and keeping track of important documents, ensuring that the organization's staff members are supported.

It's key to emphasize past experience juggling multiple priorities or organizing data in your application materials for a nonprofit admin role. For instance, did you coordinate meetings while taking notes? Maybe you were tasked with inputting sales numbers into a database or organizing materials for big events.

Quantify your responsibilities as best you can—here are some examples:

• Coordinated the schedules of 10+ executives.
• Led the organization of 15+ company events annually, resulting in a 20% increase in employee satisfaction according to internal survey data.
• Created and maintained a digital filing system that supported a team of 50 staff members.

Communication skills

Social-impact professionals in administrative positions should be comfortable interacting with a diverse group of people, including fellow employees, community members or clients, and donors! To highlight your strong communications skills in an application, make sure to talk about previous roles that required you to interact with others. Customer service positions, sales roles, and writing gigs are great examples!

Here are some ideas of how to reflect your written and verbal communication skills on a resume for an administration position:

• Created materials for staff training sessions and led 3 interns through the onboarding process each quarter.
• Managed 20 client accounts, maintaining a 95% customer satisfaction rate through regular and effective communication.
• Assisted both online and in-store visitors with customer service, which included phone, email, and in-person communication.

Teamwork skills

Administrative roles also include a fair bit of collaboration; between working across departments, speaking to clients and community members, and delegating various tasks, it's helpful to be a good team player. When emphasizing your interpersonal skills on a resume, try to highlight past roles where you collaborated on projects that had multiple stakeholders.

Here are some examples for your application materials:

• Led weekly team meetings to share insights and best practices, provide updates, and improve collaboration.
• Mentored 3 interns through weekly "Lunch and Learns" and by providing feedback on their resumes.
• Collaborated with Leadership, the Communications team, and other stakeholders to develop four online content pieces that reflected the company vision.

Technology skills

In today's digital age, many admin roles will require successful candidates to have experience using a variety of digital platforms. Project management platforms like Asana, Slack, Airtable, and Monday.com are common across for-profit and social-impact organizations, but you may also want to highlight your experience with other tech, too.

Depending on your past experience, here are some ideas of transferable skills in technology to highlight on your resume:

• Uploaded new website content via WordPress.
• Automated a payroll process by implementing ADP for 25+ employees.
• Onboarded ~5 new employees each year to various internal communication platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Asana, and Slack.

Now that you know how to highlight your transferable skills for nonprofit administrative jobs, you probably see that corporate gigs aren't all that different. By concretely mentioning these skills in your application materials, you can position yourself as a valuable asset to any nonprofit organization.

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About the Author | Tiffany Woodall is the founder and job search strategist at Creating Better Mondays, where she helps passionate, purpose-driven people find jobs that feel fulfilling. Tiffany holds a B.A. in journalism from Penn State University and resides in Chapel Hill, NC.