Determining Your Skills

Once you have identified your work values and thought about where your job interests lie, you need to progress further and think about your skills, knowledge and experience. In thinking about this, it is important not just to think about what you do in your current work, but also to incorporate what you have done in previous jobs and outside of paid work.

Assessing your Skills

In order to assess your skills, put yourself in the role of an employer - what information would you need to assure yourself that a candidate was capable of doing a job?

• Evidence of previous work.
  This would help determine whether the candidate was likely to have the skills, knowledge and experience required for the job.
• Educational qualifications.
  This would give an indication of overall level of their ability and show whether they had the specific skills and knowledge required for certain types of work.
• Key skills, such as IT skills or communication skills.

The importance given to each of these elements will vary significantly for different kinds of jobs. While qualifications are important for professional and technical occupations, they may be less important for managerial and non-technical jobs, where experience and skills are the key indicators of suitability. More importance will be attached to recent work history than to qualifications that were gained many years ago.

Use these same guiding principles when you are working out whether you are qualified to do any type of job. You have to review your skills, knowledge and experience, as well as your educational qualifications, to determine what sort of jobs you may be capable of doing.

Determining Your Overall Skill Level

The first step is to make an overall assessment of your skill level, to enable you to see in what areas you feel you have skills. Think about your skills in relation to the four main areas we looked at in finding your job interests: people, data, ideas and things.

1. People

These skills involve working with people, and so might include persuading and negotiating, managing and organizing, supporting and giving help, entertaining, teaching, understanding other people, and other important interpersonal skills.

2. Data

These skills involve handling information, and so might include working with figures in an IT environment, interpreting data, and deciding how best to communicate and present information.

3. Ideas

These skills involve being creative, and so might include designing or adapting things, having an interest in ideas and how to develop them, being innovative, improvising, investigating and experimenting.

4. Things

These skills involve making or constructing things, and so might include the ability to understand how things work, the manual skills in using tools and working with machinery or having good hand-eye coordination.

Look at each of the areas in the above list - how do you rate yourself in each of these areas? Are you excellent at working with people, data, ideas and things? Great? OK? No good at all? How do you think you compare to other people working in the jobs that you are interested in?

Looking At Skills in More Detail

Once you have found the areas where you feel you have skills, you will need to generate a more detailed list of the skills, knowledge and experience you have acquired. Think of things you have done in your current job, your previous jobs, projects and assignments and outside activities, and try to answer the following questions to identify the specific skills you have used.

1. People

Did you work with people in any of your previous work? If so, in what way? Communicating with them? Teaching or training them? Persuading them or selling something to them? Was leadership involved?

2. Data

Did you work with data in any of your previous work? How? Did you have to administer or organize it? Was attention to detail important? Were you collating information or figures? Were IT skills used? Were financial skills involved?

3. Ideas

Did you work with ideas in any of your previous work? Did this include designing something? Were you creating something? Researching or finding out about it? How did you plan this work?

4. Things

Did you work with things in any of your previous work? What sort of things? Tools or machines? Were physical skills, such as hand-eye coordination important?

Highlighting Knowledge and Experience

Next, list the knowledge that you used when carrying out the activities in each job or role. Did you need specific academic or professional qualifications? Did you gain any knowledge from performing in this job?

Finally, list the experience you gained from taking part  in this activity. What did you like or dislike about it? What special experience do you associate with this job? Did you work as part of a team or on your own?

Bringing It All Together

Now you are at a point where you can review what you have learned about yourself. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you see any pattern in skills, knowledge and experience you have acquired?
• Have some skills come up several times?
• Are they in the same categories?
• Is there a pattern in the skills you are good at?
• Do you like doing these things?
• Which skills would you like to use more?
• Which skills are the most important to you?

You can now look at your skills and knowledge in relation to the jobs that you may be interested in.

• Do you have the right knowledge and skills to do the job?
• Can you provide evidence that you have these skills and knowledge?
• Are there other skills or knowledge that are necessary to do this job?

Finally, in terms of experience and qualifications:

• Do you have the necessary experience to prove to someone that you can do the job?
• Do you feel you have the experience, but would find it difficult to persuade someone that it is relevant?
• Do you need to start thinking about how you intend to gain the relevant experience?
• Are there any qualifications that someone in this job is expected to have?
• Do you (or are you about to) have them?
• Do you need to think about getting these qualifications?