Skills

What are your skills and which do you most enjoy using? Identifying your skills helps you in two ways. First, the talents you posses and enjoy are a crucial part of defining your ideal job. Secondly, securing a good job involves more than defining what you want. Your skills make you valuable, and once you find the job you want, they will help you secure it.

The first step is to create a skills inventory. Like previous exercises on values and knowledge, it is tempting to question the necessity of going through all this bother. You may feel you have limited skills, or that you already have a good idea of what they are. In either case, you are wrong. Everyone has a host of skills and going through a process like this is the only way to develop a detailed picture of what they are.

The activities you have previously displayed a talent for define your skills. This provides an easy avenue to create an inventory. The first step is to write down things you have accomplished. The exercise in What Color Is Your Parachute suggests seven, this website says six. There is no magic number, but I believe five to be a minimum sample size and more than ten is overkill.

Take out a piece of paper and write down 5-10 things you have accomplished in the past. The accomplishments can be anything from your work or personal life. For example:

Held supervisor job with construction firm
Interviewed potential job candidates
Organized 30th birthday party
Completed the West Coast Trail (hiking trail)
Edited my friend’s movie script
Coached kids soccer team
Built a dining room table
Created new reporting process at work
Redecorated my home

Next, provide details of each item on your list. Include major issues you overcame, measures of your success, the results of your accomplishment, and most importantly, a step-by-step list of tasks and activities you did to accomplish your goal.

The only thing remaining is accumulating your skills inventory. You need a checklist of skills to get you started. The Parachute book contains one, but this online version is just as good. If you think you have a skill that is not on the list be sure to add it.

Go back through the details of your accomplishments and place a check mark beside any skills you used. Then highlight the skills that you enjoy using. Take the top five skills that you enjoy and rewrite in your own words. Your final objective is to create a description of the skills you most enjoy using.

Values and knowledge create the broad outline of the job you are looking for. A skills inventory provides detail by defining the skills you enjoy and can offer an employer.