Acting’s Transferable Skills: Why Your Craft Matters Beyond the Stage
Acting equips you with more than just stage presence, it builds a powerful set of transferable skills. From communication and empathy to adaptability and creativity. The strengths you develop through your craft can open doors far beyond the theatre.
Welcome back to another edition of the Schreiber Scribes! If you missed last month’s blog (Part II of our special series on insecurity and rejection in the business), catch up here.
Things are heating up in the city, and while August may open the final act of summer, we think it’s the perfect time to shed light on how your acting skills can help you shine beyond the stage or screen.
Honing your craft through classes has obvious benefits: it can deepen your ability to authentically inhabit your character and connect to audiences through storytelling. But beyond the industry, your acting skills give you invaluable transferable skills that make you an asset in lots of non-theatrical settings. Whether in your day job, corporate gig, education, or even in your interpersonal relationships, your craft provides a foundation of professional and personal strengths.
What Your Acting Skills Can Do for You
As a working actor, you’ve dedicated countless hours to sharpening your skills, from memorizing lines to blocking scenes to navigating the chaos of auditions and callbacks. And that work requires skills like consistent discipline, a sharp memory, keen focus, and rapid recall.
But maybe you’re curious about how you can be valuable in other industries . . . or maybe, like many actors, you’re just looking to secure a steady day job!
The good news? Your acting background offers a toolkit of transferable workplace skills that make you a strong candidate in many professional environments.
From the Stage to the Workplace: How Transferable Skills Give You a Competitive Edge
First, working actors have to master the art of communication, often cited as one of the most crucial transferable soft skills in any work environment. Clear communication feeds directly into efficiency, creating a seamless, productive and positive workflow.
Your ability to express yourself clearly, authentically, and powerfully goes far beyond others, and these strengths translate seamlessly into transferable communication skills useful in boardrooms, classrooms, or client meetings. There’s also benefit in an actor’s sharp active listening skills; you’ve got a knack for picking up on the little verbal and non-verbal details that add up to understanding the full picture.
Plus, your confidence and strong presence means you’ll never have stage fright when presenting, pitching, or leading meetings, another transferable performance skill that employers love.
Then there’s an actor’s social and emotional intelligence. Your skills go beyond simply being able to “read people.” Your training helps you understand others’ motivations, recognize multiple perspectives, and tap into empathy in a way that helps you deeply relate to anyone. Outside of acting, these abilities mean you have expansive insight and can make others feel truly heard. And those skills are invaluable across a range of workplace roles (like leadership, customer service, or counseling) or any interpersonal situation that calls for genuine human connection
Finally, an actor’s creativity, cognitive adaptability, collaborative aptitude, and problem-solving talents gives you the mindset and attitude to succeed in a variety of roles.
Let’s face it: between tech issues, missed cues, flubbed lines, and more, live theatre can be full of surprises. And your ability to think on your feet, make flexible choices, and find creative solutions fast are assets in our rapidly changing world.
An Actor’s Transferable Skills are Being Studied in the Field of Applied Theater
So, you can see how your theatre training can take you beyond the stage or acting classroom into other professional or interpersonal roles.
But can an actor’s skills transfer even further? Can you apply those same communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and creativity skills toward the greater good in other settings?
Applied theatre is all about serving communities using skill sets developed in theatrical practices. Using shadow puppetry in schools to teach children about energy use. Teaching storytelling and acting techniques to help clinical patients process trauma or improve communication and motor skills, or creating a theatrical performance from interviews. These bring a community closer together and are all examples of applied theatre.
Based on the work of Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist Augusto Boal, applied theatre extends beyond conventional, mainstream theatre. Taking place outside of traditional theatrical settings, applied theatre works toward social change by aiming to be responsive to the stories, origins, and priorities of ordinary people. As Boal put it, “it’s not theatre in a playhouse, theatre with written script . . . because theatre is what we have inside.”
Our own Managing Director Gillian Nogeire is an experience applied theatre practitioner, with work focusing on the study of Shakespeare in prisons to reduce recidivism as well as using multimodal theatrical practice for individuals with aphasia, a neurological impairment impacting language. Both prime examples of the profound impact of acting’s transferable skills in healing and education.
Applying the Craft
In Boal’s eyes, we are all actors. Whether you’re pursuing a career onstage or simply curious about the art form, acting gives you more than performance. It gives you a library of transferable skills that enrich your professional, creative, and personal life.