Transferable skills are thus gained from work and outside work, and help you get work when you have lost work (or, more euphemistically, ‘in case you need to change your job’) because they allow you to move between jobs: you are transferability itself. We might wonder if they are skills with content or instead the generic capacity to acquire skills which in the end turns out to be something slightly different, namely flexibility?
I want to suggest that the increasingly precariousness of contemporary employment, as well as the demands placed upon education by governments, management and employers have meant that transferable skills – or really, the ability to move between various forms of insecure employment at short notice – are a cover story for the creation of transferable people.
The blurring of the boundary between life and work (you can pick up transferable skills anywhere and everywhere!) and the generic nature of the skills themselves are geared towards the generation of a workforce trained to accept that it must work zero-hours contracts, be un- or under-employed for long periods of time and adapt quickly to the practical and social demands of agency work or short-term contracts. More worryingly, we can ask what skills are being taught alongside the ‘transferable’ ones, or whether in fact, skills with content or practical value are less significant in an economy that requires a large people of workers trained not with specialist skills but with the capacity to be replaced at short notice.