If you've had multiple jobs in your life, have you been able to carry over acquired expertise from job to job to job?

My current job ended up being the equivalent of a career change. Still a little unsettled, I carried over some skills but am having to start pretty close to square 1.

From Navy seaman, to cake decorator…
can’t begin to tell you how many similarities.

This is the sort of question that I cannot mull over for very long without this sort of creeping eerie paranoia rising in my gut. Initially I was going to say that dumb luck and a high metabolism granted me all of these opportunities for jobs which left me with valuable skills I rarely employ. But all
the fun in gloating over these skills is smothered with the realization that all of it, including the high metabolism boils down in the end to blind luck. My job history before “settling down” is right in line with the rest of the extraordinary pile of cumulative good fortune bestowed on a man absolutely devoid of ambition. I can rebuild an engine or refigeration system simply because I had the good fortune to have matured in an era when a man of no ambition or thought for his future could get away with doing whatever spiked his curiosity. Blind luck- I was in my late teens in an age when an 18 year old without a high school
education could land a job that would support both a family and a mortgage while a credit hour at Harvard would cost you 20 bucks if you paid at all.

I think the end result was the conglomerate of all my jobs. The hard labor in adverse conditions part of sailing I learned early as a carpenter and as a merchant marine. I learned hospitality and customer service from being a waiter and bartender. I learned about running my own business, business dynamics and employee relations from being part owner of bars and restaurants from my father. I learned discipline, leadership, navigation from being an officer in the merchant marine. I learned how to deal with people in adverse conditions and medicine from being a nurse and disaster worker.

And it all led up to being a skipper on a sailboat for charter, my own business. My boat is safe because I know food preservation, preparation, storage and rotation and I know field expedient medicine. Navigation and operating a boat per rules of the road, radio communication, how to deal with customs and the coasties I learned in the merchant marines. LOL. I think this is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

Absolutely. Started at a newspaper (editing) which got me a job at a magazine (editing, writing), which vaulted me into advertising and marketing (writing, radio & tv commercial production, voice work), and finally creative management with a technology company. Then I retired and became a freelance video and audio editor. All in all, a damn good career.

Yes. My earlier jobs were in administration/management and so much of my current job is about admin and managing people. And I teach in a field I worked too (not admin/management). I was actually amazed at how much I used my earlier skills and knowledge when I came into this job and I doubt I could have managed it without my earlier experience.