Transferable Skills: Taking What You do in Psi Beta and Bringing it to the Workforce
Kimberley Duff and Jerry Rudmann
Psi Beta’s mission is to promote and recognize excellence in scholarship, leadership, research, and community service. Being active in Psi Beta allows you to develop and practice skills that employers, graduate schools, and scholarship committees value. It is essential to be able to identify your skillset and effectively communicate it to others who will make decisions that impact your future (employers, admissions officers, and others).
Fortunately, three years ago, the American Psychological Association created a task force that researched the skills employers want in recent college graduates. The task force matched the employers’list of skills to skills that you already are learning in your psychology courses and co-curricular activities. The task force organized these skills into five domains: Cognitive, Communication, Personal, Social, and Technological. Each domain area contains a variety of essential skills. As a member of Psi Beta, you have additional opportunities to develop and showcase these valuable skills. Here’s a link to a report on this.
We courage you to think about what skills you possess, the skills you need to work on, and how you can demonstrate these skills. What Psi Beta activities have you engaged in, or could do now to develop these skills?