Analyse Your Skills...

...and put them to work!

Analyse Your Skills by listing your top ten achievements or career events that you are most proud of. You should do this in the way I've just shown you by looking at your achievements which are your richest source of information providing concrete and tangible evidence of what you have done so far. Use an active verb at the beginning of the phrase, and you’ll hear how much more powerful it sounds.

Now you can start to analyse your skills by asking yourself what you did (try: where did I start?)

Then think about what happened next? (or perhaps - what did I say?)

The next stage is to consider what skills you used when you did the thing you achieved (how did I do that? What did I need to do it?)

You'll end up with very clear statements of your real capabilities.

If you think you might be lacking in some essential skill area, one other thing you just might want to consider is: should I set out to learn a new skill now? You could choose from over 200 courses from ICS the world's #1 in home learning.

Skills are often described as

 Functional: Analyse your skills which you use to deal with the world around you e.g. people, data, things, ideas.

 Personal: Analyse your skills that you use to manage yourself.

 Technical: Analyse your skills that you use and develop for aspects of your job.

Examples of words describing skills:

Analysing; summarising; selecting; testing; reporting; communicating; presentation; listening; questioning; report-writing; co-operation; planning; delegation; negotiation; leading; motivating; facilitating; organising; meeting deadlines; setting targets; prioritising; collating; assembling; problem-solving, developing ideas, coaching; influencing; team-working; visualising; goal-setting; persistence; resilience; managing; achieving results.

Make yourself a chart to take stock of your achievements:

Achievement 1

"Convinced colleagues of the need to change working practices"

Skills used

Communication; analysis; presentation; commerciality; financial awareness; negotiation;

When you've done that for all of your achievements list all of your skills so you can rate them for transferability; most of your skills will transfer to another job quite easily.

My recommendation is to think not just "how good am I?" but to ask "how much do I enjoy this?" The skills that score most highly on both counts are your most transferable skills and you will be able to use them in many different settings.

Write them down - score them out of 10 then add up - the highest skills analysis scores are the ones you can use in your self-marketing statements to best effect.

Please don’t think that you can’t do something just because you haven’t done a job with that title before – let me explain that.

Most jobs involve a lot of the same skills and just a small layer of things that are specific so you’re probably a lot closer than you think!!

All you have to do is analyse your skills one at a time and then think how each one can be applied in a different setting.

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