Assess your skills

 

Types of skills

As you progress through your work life, you acquire many different skills from a broad range of experiences and training. Skills fall into a number of categories, and there are different ways to describe them.

Here are some examples:

Skill Categories

Skill Category

Examples

Using Your Hands

Assembling things, operating machinery, repairing things

Using Your Body

Doing outdoor activities like camping, being physically active, having muscular coordination as in gymnastics

Using Words

Reading, writing, speaking, teaching

Using Your Five Senses

Observing, inspecting, diagnosing

Using Numbers

Counting, computing, record-keeping

Using Intuition

Acting on « gut » reactions, anticipating future events, sizing up a situation or person

Using Analytical Thinking or Logic

Researching, analyzing, prioritizing

Using Originality or Creativity

Imagining, inventing, designing, engineering

Using Helpfulness

Having sensitivity to others’ feelings, conveying warmth, drawing others out, motivating, guiding

Using Artistic Abilities

Fashioning or shaping things, composing, playing an instrument, painting, decorating, cooking

Using Leadership

Initiating new projects, organizing, directing, making decisions, taking risks

Using Follow-Through

Using what others have developed, following through on plans or instructions, attending to details, filing, retrieving information

What are your strongest skills?

    The first step is to take stock of your existing skills, and to assess which ones are your strongest. There are several ways to do this, including these:

    • Experimenting with assessment tools, checklists, and short exercises
    • Asking your friends, family, and colleagues to give their opinions about what you do best
    • Asking a career counselor to help

    Know your transferable skills

    Do you worry that you can’t apply your current skills to a new job? By identifying your transferable skills, you might find that you have the necessary qualifications after all.

    Key Idea

    When assessing your skills, it’s especially important to identify your transferable skills. These are skills that have value regardless of the business context in which you’re using them.

    For example:

    • Writing
    • Motivating others
    • Organizing data
    • Interpreting information

    Why is it important to know your transferable skills?

    • Knowing this information allows you to widen the selection of potentially interesting work opportunities to include all those in which you would use your transferable skills.
    • You can avoid the common misconception that, in order to try a new work area, you need to develop a whole new set of skills. You may realize you don’t necessarily need to go back to school to develop new skills for a different opportunity.
    • You can market yourself to potential new supervisors in a whole new area of work by pointing out your transferable skills.