The authors’ contribution aims at putting into perspective two types of skills representations: the social representations gleaned from a body of French national press material and the representations of guidance professionals. An analysis of this press corpus was carried out using the IRaMuTeQ software (Ratinaud, 2014), which provided a window onto ideology-marked semantic organisations and themes for the two sub-objects “transversal skills” and “transferable skills”. After ascertaining that the notions of “transversal” and “transferable” are actually representational elements of the skill concept for the guidance professionals surveyed, the authors attempted to apprehend their professional representations. Put into perspective, the results show that the social representations disseminated in the media do indeed inform professional representations of the skill object, thereby confirming Feyel’s postulate that “the media reflect society. They mirror its cultural, political, social and economic development” (2007, p. 186). Certain ideologically marked elements, however, appear not to be present in guidance professionals